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Curious assignment behaviour

Dale Strickland-Clark dale at riverhall.NOSPAMco.uk
Tue Oct 9 05:01:29 EDT 2001 
Thanks for bringing me up-to-date with this debate.

I'm not sure I sympathise with the philosophy that if you can't please
everyone then don't please anyone. An argumentative group can thus
bring progress to a stand-still.

For just about any operator you can come up with an example that needs
parenthesise to behave in the 'natural' way rather than the way forced
by precedence. 

Assignment in expressions, particularly in conditional statements can
reduce complexity and simplify legibility. 

You can always write code that's difficult to understand and I would
argue that the recently added list comprehension syntax can be a real
pig to decypher but I wouldn't be without it now.

Not introducing a feature because it might make some code more
difficult to understand is on a par with not letting adults buy knives
in case they cut themselves.

That's my twopence worth, anyway. :-)
--
Dale Strickland-Clark
Riverhall Systems Ltd
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