On Fri, Apr 20, 2018 at 1:30 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull
<turnbull.stephen...@u.tsukuba.ac.jp> wrote:
> Christoph Groth writes:
>
> > Wouldn't it be a pity not to liberate assignments from their boring
> > statement existence?
>
> Maybe not. While it would be nice to solve the loop-and-a-half
> "problem" and the loop variable initialization "problem" (not everyone
> agrees these are even problems, especially now that we have
> comprehensions and generator expressions), as a matter of taste I like
> the fact that this particular class of side effects is given weighty
> statement syntax rather than more lightweight expression syntax.
>
> That is, I find statement syntax more readable.
>
If you've read the PEP, you'll see that it encourages the use of
assignment statements whereever possible. If statement syntax is
generally more readable, by all means, use it. That doesn't mean there
aren't situations where the expression syntax is FAR more readable.
Tell me, is this "more readable" than a loop with an actual condition in it?
def sqrt(n):
guess, nextguess = 1, n
while True:
if math.isclose(guess, nextguess): return guess
guess = nextguess
nextguess = n / guess
Readable doesn't mean "corresponds closely to its disassembly",
despite the way many people throw the word around. It also doesn't
mean "code I like", as opposed to "code I don't like". The words for
those concepts are "strongly typed" and "dynamically typed", as have
been demonstrated through MANY online discussions. (But I digress.)
Readable code is code which expresses an algorithm, expresses the
programmer's intent. It adequately demonstrates something at a
*higher* abstraction level. Does the algorithm demonstrated here
include an infinite loop? No? Then it shouldn't have "while True:" in
it.
Now, this is a pretty obvious example. I deliberately wrote it so you
could simply lift the condition straight into the while header. And I
hope that everyone here agrees that this would be an improvement:
def sqrt(n):
guess, nextguess = 1, n
while not math.isclose(guess, nextguess):
guess = nextguess
nextguess = n / guess
return guess
But what if the condition were more complicated?
def read_document(file):
doc = ""
while (token := file.get_next_token()) != "END":
doc += token
return doc
The loop condition is "while the token is not END", or "while
get_next_token() doesn't return END", depending on your point of view.
Is it "more readable" to put that condition into the while header, or
to use an infinite loop and a break statement, or to duplicate a line
of code before the loop and at the bottom of the loop? Which one best
expresses the programmer's intention?
ChrisA
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