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PEP 308: Alternative conditional operator forms

Nick Vargish nav at adams.patriot.net
Thu Feb 13 15:54:27 EST 2003 
mis6 at pitt.edu (Michele Simionato) writes:

> I tested the proposed syntax showing it to my girlfriend (see the
> thread on usability studies). She is an happy non-programmer  [...]

I really enjoyed your post about your girlfriend's reactions to
various constructs, but I took it more as humor than as a serious
attempt at a usability study. As humor, it was excellent.

The problem with taking your SO's reactions as a direction for
language design is that we are not designing a natural lanuage, but a
programming language. I think there's a big difference between a
"naive programmer" and a "non-programmer"... Your girlfried probably
also finds 

x = 1 unless y == 2, then x = 3

very readable (though the == is a "mistake", I know). I'm hoping we
won't see _that_ added to PEP-308.

Nick

p.s. I'm married to a non-programmer. There's no way I'd use my spouse
as a language design filter. :^)

-- 
# sigmask.py  ||  version 0.2  ||  2003-01-07  ||  Feed this to your Python.
print reduce(lambda x,y:x+chr(ord(y)-1),'Ojdl!Wbshjti!=obwAqbusjpu/ofu?','')
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