Re: Lisp history: IF, etc.

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:

I use this in Python, to try to avoid that abortion that is the Python
conditional expression. Instead of, say,
>
   a = x / y if y != 0 else 0
>
I would do
>
    a = (lambda : 0, lambda : x / y)[y != 0]()

Do you use this in real code?

Apart from my stomach revolting against this (interesting!) construct, I
am in fact surprised that it works: I did not know that tuples can be
indexed by boolean values (feels C-like). I am also surprised that True
"equals" to 1 in this context and False to 0 (rather not C-like).

Could you please give some pointers about the rationale (or further
documentation) here?

Best regards

Axel