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[Python-Dev] PEP 572: Assignment Expressions

Anthony Flury anthony.flury at btinternet.com
Sat Apr 21 07:48:45 EDT 2018 
On 21/04/18 11:18, Chris Angelico wrote:
>> But you haven't answered anything about what "readable" means. Does it
>> mean "if I look at this code, I can predict what dis.dis() would
>> output"? Or does it mean "this code clearly expresses an algorithm and
>> the programmer's intent"? Frequently I hear people complain that
>> something is unreadable because it fails the former check. I'm much
>> more interested in the latter check. For instance, this line of code
>> expresses the concept "generate the squares of odd numbers":
>>
>> [x*x for x in range(100) if x % 2]
>>
>> But it doesn't clearly express the disassembly. Is that a problem? Are
>> list comprehensions a bad feature for that reason? I don't think so.
>>
>> ChrisA

For what it worth - readability for me is all about understanding the 
intent. I don't care (most of the time) about how the particular code 
construct is actually implemented. When I am maintaining code (or trying 
to) I need to understand what the developer intended (or in the case of 
a bug, the gap between the outcome and the intention).

One of the challenges about readability is it partially depends on skill 
level - for a beginner the comprehension may well be baffling where as 
someone with more skills would  understand it - almost intuitively; as 
an example: I have been using Python for 7 years - and comprehensions 
with more than one for loop still are not intuitive for me, I can't read 
them without an amount of deep thought about how the loops work together.

-- 
-- 
Anthony Flury
email : *Anthony.flury at btinternet.com*
Twitter : *@TonyFlury <https://twitter.com/TonyFlury/>*
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