As part of my series on Python's syntactic sugar, I am going to cover the for statement. As usual, I will be diving into CPython's C code, but understanding or even reading those parts of this post won't be required in order to understand

In this post, as part of my series on Python's syntactic sugar, I'm going to cover assert statements. Now, the actual unravelling of the syntax for assert a, b is already given to us by the language reference: if __debug__: if not a: raise

As part of my series on Python's syntactic sugar, I am going to cover import statements. This will include delving into the quirky interface of __import__()(although in actual code you should use importlib.import_module()). What this post will not cover, though, is

As part of my series on Python's syntactic sugar, I am going to cover boolean operations: a or b and a and b. The semanticsA key thing to know about or and and is that they short-circuit. What that means is that if just

This post in my series on Python's syntactic sugar, I am going to cover membership testing: in and not in. As the language reference says, "the operators in and not in test for membership". In other words, in and not in are used to

For this next blog post in my series of Python's syntactic sugar, I'm tackling what would seem to be a very simple bit of syntax, but which actually requires diving into multiple layers to fully implement: not. On the surface, the definition of not

As part of this blog series on Python's syntactic sugar, I said in the post on unary arithmetic operators that it might be the most boring post in this series. I think I was wrong. 😄 The operators is and is not are very short.

For the next part of my blog series on pulling apart Python's syntactic sugar, I'm going to be tackling rich comparison operators: ==, !=, >, <, >=, <=. For this post I am going to be picking apart the example of a > b. Looking at

In this entire blog series on Python's syntactic sugar, this might end up being the most boring post. 😄 We will cover the unary arithmetic operators: -, +, and ~ (inversion if you don't happen to be familiar with that last operator). Due to the fact that

PrologueThis post is part of a series on Python's syntactic sugar. The latest source code can be found as part of the desugar project. IntroductionPython has something called augmented arithmetic assignment. If you're not familiar with that phrase, it's basically when you do some

[This post has been updated multiple times since it's initial posting; see the Corrections section at the end for what was changed.] The reaction to my blog post on unravelling attribute access was positive enough that I'm inspired to do another post on how

I wonder how many people realize that Python has a lot of syntactic sugar? I'm not claiming it's like a Lisp-based language where the syntax is as bare bones as possible (although the Lisp comparison is not entirely unfounded), but much of Python's syntax