Conditional expressions in any form are an attractive thing

May 30, 2019

In a recent entry I mentioned in passing that I once had relatively strong feelings about Python's 'A if COND else B_' conditional expressions but those had probably faded away. In a comment, Twirrim said:

I've started to use the A if FOO else BAR syntax, much to my surprise. In general, I hate it.

One increasingly common pattern in the code I write:

logging.basicConfig(level=logging.DEBUG if args.verbose else logging.INFO)

(or variations thereof, if I'm using a CLI framework like click)

Yes, very much this. One of my feelings about almost any form of ternary operator or conditional expression is that having it at all is so attractive that people will use almost any syntax that you come up with, regardless of what they feel about the syntax. Condensing a multi-line set of statements down to a single expression is sufficiently compelling that people will put up with a great deal to get it. I'll go so far as to say that people will willingly make their code less readable to get it.

There are ways around needing a conditional expression in situations like this, and I have probably adopted some of them in my code; for example, I might initialize a global 'log level' variable or setting based on things like the verbosity level the user has set on the command line. Whether or not this is a good thing is probably in the eye of the beholder, and I'm sure that some people will say that the best code is the one that spells it out explicitly (perhaps in a function that you call to determine the log level).

(In my view, the obvious corollary of how attractive conditional expressions are is that it's important to give them good syntax. Unlike other language constructs, where sufficiently annoying syntax may lead to them not being used, conditional expressions will likely get used no matter what. If your syntax is less than ideal, it'll still be all over code bases sooner or later.)

Sidebar: My use of conditional expressions has now surprised me

In my first entry, I claimed that I hadn't used conditional expressions yet. That was based on grep'ing an assortment of code that I had on hand, but it turns out that I wasn't complete enough. More extensive searching turned up at least two places (and then now a third). First, our Django app has one usage, which Mercurial tells me dates from 2013. Of course, Python's conditional expressions are also very old; they first appeared in Python 2.5, which was released in September of 2006.

More embarrassingly, the source code for DWiki turns out to have several uses, and some of these are reasonably complex, where I wrote things like:

avar = b if b else c.thing if c else None

I'm not sure if this nested code is a good idea, especially without ()'s to make ordering clear, but for what it's worth I can sort of read it out even now, several years after I wrote it.

(And I also used it in one place in a recent little utility program. As you might guess from my difficulties here, our Python code is scattered all over.)

Written on 30 May 2019.
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Last modified: Thu May 30 00:25:49 2019
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