== A Python (non-)idiom that I should really avoid

One of my bad habits as a Python programmer is that I am both lazy and
impatient. I will go out of my way to do something overly clever just
because it saves me some boring boiler-plate code, and because Python is
such a compact language already my threshold for this irritation is very
low.

One of the things that this leads me to is writing conditional
variable initializations like this:

>  var = None
>  if condition:
>      var = something()

I've recently come to the conclusion that this is a bad idiom that I
should avoid. On the 'good' side, I've saved a line and the annoyance
of writing the boiler-plate if/else (at the trivial cost of an extra
assignment). On the bad side, what I've found recently is that that
the '_var = None_' assignment can easily look a little bit too much
like it could have been a temporary addition done for debugging or code
testing. In fact I almost removed such an initialization today during a
cleanup pass of stripping my debugging and testing code from a program
before committing the changes to the repository. Actually putting the
_else:_ in makes it clear to me that both initializations are supposed
to be there.

(Of course there's all the general style and 'clever: -5 points' issues
involved with writing code like this. But, well, I'm lazy and impatient
and so I sometimes do this stuff anyways.)

I suppose I should be thankful that I don't really like [[Python's
conditional expressions MoreAndOrAbuse]], and also that I'm still
writing code for Python 2.4.6, which doesn't have them so I don't
have a choice about liking or not liking them. Writing the above
as:

> _var = something() if condition else None_

is just far too clever, partly because [[I find that the order makes it
hard to read ../programming/InvertedConditionals]].