[Python-Dev] conditional expressions?

[Tim Peters]

[Skip Montanaro]
> Regardless whether or not you think this could make it into
> 2.2b1, I hope if you proceed it will get a PEP a reasonable
> amount of time before the CVS checkin... <0.1 wink>.

Guido can exempt himself from the PEP process if he feels like it.  If he
does, I expect I'll be in the "retroactive PEP" business again.

> It seems downright weird to me that the syntactic baggage
> necessary to write a conditional expression is greater the the
> baggage necessary to write an if statement (new "then" keyword, parens
> required for disambiguation).

There are many ways a conditional expression could be spelled.  This is
aiming at the easiest way to read; harder-to-read ways could be introduced
with less disruption of the kinds you're focusing on.

> The parens function pretty much as "{...}" in C, Java, Perl, etc.

Sorry, I don't see the resemblance.

> It's a step away from indentation-based block structure and toward
> delimiter-based block structure.

Ditto.

> If you add it, I think it will be harder to justify the lack of
> delimiter-based block stucture at the statement level.  It will
> just be one more argument in the arsenal of people whose knee-jerk
> reaction to Python's block structure is to whine about it.

I'm not concerned about 21 bad arguments versus 20 <wink>.