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Comment by agumonkey | Hacker News Reader

do people use

    x = x or []

or is it considered non idiomatic in python ?

It’s okay-ish. You do need to be careful about what falsey values `x` might be tho, as it could introduce edge-case bugs.

Using `x = [] if x is None else x` is more precise.

I would really just write `if x is None: x = []`