Comment by aib | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aib | Hacker News Reader

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The problem is, python list comprehensions are very... specific. Add to that the brokenness of if...else and you get a very quirky and specific sublanguage that is hard for outsiders to read. And this is before we take into account the locals/scope/clojure discussion in the link and the PEP (which I frankly did not bother to read.)

On the other hand, you have a concept which translates easily to any language with first-class functions and lambdas. Even the syntax stays the same among languages which use "f(x,y)" for function evaluation and parameter passing.

/* This post is for those occasions when a list comprehension style is advocated over a functional style, which I know was not necessarily what you were doing in your comment. But I think the two points are valid enough on their own. */

> Add to that the brokenness of if...else

Could you elaborate on that?

> > Add to that the brokenness of if...else

> Could you elaborate on that?

It's a very opinionated statement on my part. `if COND then TRUE-CASE else FALSE-CASE` is the correct form to use, in my opinion. Python uses `TRUE-CASE if COND else FALSE-CASE`.

Conventional if statements in Python do use your preferred form of `if COND then TRUE-CASE else FALSE-CASE`.

What you are talking about is a different kind of expression, similar to a ternary operator. It is not the same as if...else

The reason it's not the same as if...else is that it's freaking backwards :D

You said:

> Python uses `TRUE-CASE if COND else FALSE-CASE`.

And this is wrong -- this is not how Python if statements work.

> > Python uses `TRUE-CASE if COND else FALSE-CASE`.

> And this is wrong -- this is not how Python if statements work.

Huh? Didn't you yourself say I was not talking about if statements:

> What you are talking about is a different kind of expression, similar to a ternary operator. It is not the same as if...else

In any case, I'm talking about the case that goes `TRUE-CASE if COND else FALSE-CASE`, as can be deduced from my typing `TRUE-CASE if COND else FALSE-CASE`.

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