On Fri, 7 Aug 2009 08:22:14 pm Kristján Valur Jónsson wrote: > Unless I am very much mistaken, this is the approach Ruby takes. > Everything is an expression. For example, the value of a block is > the value of The last expression in the block.
Copying what other languages do is not necessarily a bad thing, but that would fail both "explicit is better than implicit" and "in the face of ambiguity, avoid the temptation to guess". It's not immediately obvious to me why the last expression should be given that privileged rule. Why not the first expression? > I've never understood the need to have a distinction betwen > statements and expressions, not when expressions can have side > effects. It's like that differentce between procedures and functions > in pascal that only serves to confuse Its been a while, but I don't think it ever confused me. Being unable to return multiple values, *that* confused me, but the distinction between "procedures are for doing something, functions are for getting something back" was perfectly straight-forward. (And then Pascal went and made it slightly more confusing by adding var parameters, so you could get results back from a procedure and have side-effects in a function... oh well.) -- Steven D'Aprano _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
