use Perl

• ternary operators are inherently ugly (Score:2)

  by jmm (276)

  Ternary operators are inherently ugly, the only thing a language designer can do is choose amongst the flavours of ugliness.

  Having to create a syntax that lets three units (condition, true selection, false selection) be associated easily by a reader requires at least 2 operators and is an order of magnitude more awkward than binary operators. While C and Perl5 go for huffman encoding with ? : (which Perl6 is changing to ?? :: IIRC), there is history for using a more verbose mechanism, requiring more verbo
  • Historical huffman encodeing of ternary operator (Score:1)

    by n1vux (1492)

    While C and Perl5 go for huffman encoding with ? : (which Perl6 is changing to ?? :: IIRC), there is history for using a more verbose mechanism,

    The oldest is the quatenary operator or ternary if in Fortran -

    if (expr) line_lt, line_eq, line_gt

    which predates if..then by several years; but neary as old is the ternary operator if in Lisp

    (if pred-expr, true-val, false-val)

    which with is pretty well Huffman encoded.

    The beautiful thing of Perl is TIMTOWTDI ... if you won't want ternary operators, don't

    --
    Bill
    # I had a sig when sigs were cool
    use Sig;
• Backward compatibility in Python? (Score:1)

  by speters (1787)

  We will adjust the syntax of what goes inside an 'if' to disallow lambda; currently

  if lambda: x:

  is accepted but quite useless (it's always true) so this will be disallowed.

  I guess backward compatibility is an issue when working with Python. That's something rather important advocacy note to remember.