>>> Think about a more complex assignment: >>> >>> text .= encode(spam) + str(eggs) >> >> I think the only sane thing would be to disallow that, and >> require the RHS to have the form of a function call, which is >> always interpreted as a method of the LHS. > > > You obviously have a different idea of what is "sane" than I do :-) > > But okay, so we cripple the RHS so that it can only be a single method > call. So useful things like these are out: > > target .= method(arg) or default > > target .= foo(arg) if condition else bar(arg) > > and even > > target .= method(args) + 1 > > making the syntax pure sugar for > > target = target.method(args) > > and absolutely nothing else. I think that's the sort of thing which > gives syntactic sugar a bad name. > > The one positive I can see is that if the target is a compound > expression, it could be evaluated once only: > > spam[0](x, y, z).eggs['cheese'].aardvark .= method(args) > > I suppose if I wrote a lot of code like that, aside from (probably?) > violating the Law of Demeter, I might like this syntax because it > avoids repeating a long compound target.
I don’t really like this proposal for the same reasons you do I think but let’s play devils advocate for a while... I would then suggest something more readable like: foo as x = x.bar or x.something_else or even_another_thing This avoids the iffy hanging dot while allowing more complex and readable statements. It also expands trivially to tuple unpacking which the .= syntax does not. / Anders _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
