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PEP 308: A PEP Writer's Experience

Roy Smith roy at panix.com
Sun Feb 9 17:59:27 EST 2003 
b_mcerlean at yahoo.com (Brian McErlean) wrote:
> >    x > y and x or y
> 
> Yes, but this is really a strawman.  To be fair, you should argue
> against the "right" way of doing this, which (other than the trivial
> max() for this example) is:
> 
> if x > y:
>     result = x
> else:
>     result = y

I'm probably going to hate myself in the morning, but I'm forced to 
admit that, in some ways, the long-winded way (which I've been 
advocating) is inferior.

I'm a fan of refactoring (but not a zealot, in the XP-ish "refactor 
mercilessly" sense).  It's temping to want to factor the "result =" out 
of the above and end up with "result = ternary involving x>y, x, and y".  
There's both a cognitive advantage (you only have to read and understand 
it once) and a coding advantage (if you only type it once, there's no 
chance of introducing inconsistancy).
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