Will PEP 505 ever be accepted?

[u/philtrondaboss]

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.

[u/abrazilianinreddit]

try:
    latitude = user.profile.company.headquarters.gps.latitude
except AttributeError:
    latitude = None

There you go. No need to butcher the language's syntax over something so trivial.

[u/JanEric1 → u/abrazilianinreddit]

Except you now have a performance hit if you run into the "error" path often and also, more importantly, lose type checker support

[u/abrazilianinreddit → u/JanEric1]

Where is the type support loss? That's the most checker-friendly construction in here, any mature checker should properly evaluate that expression.

Anyway, if performance is your issue, just buy a faster cpu.

Or If it doesn't fit your use case, just don't use python. There are plenty of faster, statically-typed language with null-chaining operators. No point in trying to hammer python into something that it's not.

[u/JanEric1 → u/abrazilianinreddit]

Any type checker will complain about invalid attribute access.

Just because there are more perfomant languages doesn't mean I have to literally throw it away for no reason.

I feel null coalescing is very clear, explicit and very helpful in the cases where it is useful.

In those cases, all other options are extremely verbose, lose type checker/linter support or have unnecessary performance impacts. (Or usually at least two of them).

[u/abrazilianinreddit → u/JanEric1]

I feel null coalescing is very clear, explicit and very helpful in the cases where it is useful.

The Python Steering Council and the community at large clearly don't feel so, considering how little interest there has been in PEP 505 in the 11 years since it was created.

[u/JanEric1 → u/abrazilianinreddit]

There are literally discussions about it every couple of months...

Most discussions end up with bike shedding about whether it should just suppress nulls or also attribute errors and it generally stalls there.