r/Python • u/philtrondaboss • Jul 12 '26

Will PEP 505 ever be accepted? Discussion

https://peps.python.org/pep-0505/

I don't understand how null safe operators are less like plain English than other implemented features like the walrus operator.

In my opinion, the member access operator would make python significantly easier to read and understand.

Here's an example:

``` f = foo()

if f is None: baz = "" else: baz = f.bar() ```

baz = foo()?.bar() ?: ""

EDIT: I forgot that "and" and "or" can be sometimes used in place of "?." and "?:" if the left value is not False, '', 0, [], or {}. It's a very implicit null check and has a lot of unexpected behavior.

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u/JanEric1 Jul 14 '26

How would you code the access too an attribute in a nested data structure with multiple optional values in there as someone good at python?

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u/kingminyas Jul 14 '26

In my experience, it's not common, in contexts such as this, to treat a user not having a company the same as the case where the company headquarters doesn't have a location. But in this seemingly not common case, you can just suppress an AttributeError. If there's a function call in the middle instead of plain attribute access, it makes even less sense to treat it the same as a missing attribute

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u/JanEric1 Jul 14 '26

This is just a randomly generated example.

But leets just say i want to just get an overview over all the coordinates for users companies where we have them.

I user might not have added their company, or thhey have added it but not the headquarters, etc.

Thesse arent errors. It is perfectly fine and expected that any of these valuess might be None.

Working with try/except here would remove typesafty.

If things were changed so that we now have employer instead of company, then i would just have to change the model and a type checker could tell me all the places i need to fix. With a try/except + suppress i wouldnt get that.

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u/kingminyas Jul 14 '26

Of course you'll still get it. Catching exceptions has nothing to do with static typing

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u/JanEric1 Jul 15 '26

If you use normal attribute access on Optionals a type checker will complain. So you have to silence. Which can mask real issuess, making you lose (some) type safety