>It's not clear to me what it does just from reading it
How isn't it entirely obvious? := is the assignment operator in tons of languages, and there's no reason not to have assignment be an expression (as is also the case in many languages).
How isn't it entirely obvious? := is the assignment operator in tons of languages, and there's no reason not to have assignment be an expression (as is also the case in many languages).
It is? Which ones? Other than Go, I can not think of a single language that has ":=" as an operator. Java does not, JavaScript does not, C/C++ do not, Ruby does not, I don't think PHP does, Erlang/Elixir do not, Rust does not... (I could be wrong on these, but I've personally never seen it in any of these languages and I can't find any mention of it in these languages' docs).
I tried looking around the internet at various popular programming languages and the only ones I could find that use ":=" are: Pascal, Haskell (but it's used for something else than what Python uses it for), Perl (also used for something else), and Scala (but in Scala it isn't officially documented and doesn't have an 'official' use case).
I don't have a strong opinion about ":=" in Python but I do agree that it's unintuitive and thus not very "Pythonic".
At least 18 prominent languages use that syntax.
The fact that they use some "new languages" (e.g. whatever derivative stuff happens to be in fashion atm) and are not even aware of the debt of those languages to the list above, doesn't qualify them...
If programming is intellectual onanism for you, then sure you're free to entertain that idea.
There aren't even 18 prominent languages...
What qualifies as prominent to you? How old are you? On Tiobe Index only Pascal and Go are in the first 50, while half of them aren't even listed in the first 100. Sure they're important and had an impact on new languages, but most of them were made ~50 years ago.
So many new languages were developed since then, which are far more useful and prominent than these legacy ones. If almost none of the modern ones have implemented it so far, is it really that useful/needed?
But perhaps not as interested in trying old and significant languages?
>What qualifies as prominent to you? On Tiobe Index only Pascal and Go are in the first 50, while half of them aren't even listed in the first 100. Sure they're important and had an impact on new languages, but most of them were made ~50 years ago.
Well, Lisp was made 60+ years ago, and C 50 years ago, so?
Besides Go, Smalltalk, Ada, and Pascal would be significant languages in any book, and I'd add Simula, Oberon, Eiffel, and Dylan to the list.
Seriously, if one haven't at least heard of Simula (the father language of OO) I'm not sure how qualified they are to pass PL judgement.
Well, they're still seeing widespread use, that's why they're on Tiobe, while others faded into obscurity. Those languages are historically significant, but nowadays they're basically useless apart from scientific use and maintaning old software.
Maybe you should understand that the majority of programmers are younger than Python and don't study the same material they did 30 years ago, because a whole lot of history happened in that time. Also I'm not sure how not knowing about Simula makes me unqualified for anything.
I've noticed, not just in this reply, but in all of your comments; your condescending tone and indirect addressing make you seem like an unpleasant person.
Using these qualities makes one seem like some stuck-up pseudointellectual boomer.
Actually, there are a lot of other variants assignments get written in various computer languages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assignment_(computer_science)#...
The operator was inherited by Pascal, Ada, Delphi. That line of language syntax died off in the late 90's though, so I can see why younger (and in particular self-taught) programmers wouldn't be familiar with it.
So from the perspective of Python as executable pseudocode it makes some sense.