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assignment expression peeve

Paul Rubin http
Wed Oct 15 18:47:57 EDT 2003 
Carl Banks <imbosol at aerojockey.invalid> writes:
> >> The real reason is that assignment expressions lead to all kinds of
> >> ugly and unreadable code.  This is because there is no linguistic
> >> analogue for assignment as an expression.
> > 
> > Swell, tell me the linguistic analog for metaclasses.  Or should those
> > be removed too?
> 
> Paragraph that defines some of its own words?
> 
> Seriously, you're comparing apples to oranges here.  I'm comparing
> syntax here, and there's nothing syntactical about metaclasses.  If
> you want to compare a class statement to natural language, that works.

Actually, assignment expressions happen in natural language too.  
In English you could say "A guy named Bob walks into a bar".
In Python with assignment expressions, you'd write

   bar.enter(bob := Guy())

Without assignment expressions you'd have to say something like

   bob = Guy()
   bar.enter(bob)

which in English would be two sentences:

  "There's a guy named Bob.  Bob walks into a bar."

As I see it, the one-sentence, assignment-expression version is
perfectly natural and less stilted-sounding in normal conversation.
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