Chris Barker - NOAA Federal wrote: > > Personally, I even slightly prefer > > > > a := 3 > > > > to the commonplace > > > > a = 3 > > because it visually expresses the asymmetry of the operation. > > Careful here! That’s a fine argument for using := in a new language, > but people using := when they don’t need an expression because they > like the symbol better is a reason NOT to do this.
Perhaps you are right and it is indeed unrealistic to expect people to (eventually) shift to using := for simple assignments after 28 years of Python... Then I think it would be also OK to introduce a fully general ":=" but discourage its use in assignment statements. However, it seems strange to forbid the use of one expression (namely ":=") as a statement while all other expressions are allowed. (So there seems no alternative to accepting both = and := in statements, and if I understand you correctly you consider this a problem.) One way or the other, I'd like to underline a point that I made yesterday: I believe that it's important for sanity that taking any existing assignment statement and replacing all occurrences of "=" by ":=" does not have any effect on the program. PEP 572 currently proposes to make ":=" a binary operator that is evaluated from right to left. Christoph _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
