I have a code like this if condition: a = f(x) else: a = g(y) Initialization of a inside of the block looks bad for me. Can it be written better? I cannot use ternary operator, because names of functions and/or lists of arguments are long. Saying "long" I mean that the following expression a = f(x) if condition else g(y) will take more than 79 (sometimes even more than 119) symbols with real names instead of a, f, g, x, y and condition. Usage of multiple slashes will make the code ugly and messy. I don't want to initialize a with result of one of the functions by defaul, because both function are slow and I cannot allow such overhead a = g(y) if condition: a = f(x) I can initialize the variable with None, but is this solution pretty enough? a = None if condition: a = f(x) else: a = g(y) Let me explain my position: in C and C++ variables inside of a block have the block as their scope. In ES6 the let keyword was introduced — it allows to create variables with the same scoping rules as variables in C and C++. Variables defined with old var keyword have similar scoping rules as in Python. That's why I think that initialization of variables should be made outside blocks if I want to use the variables outside these blocks. Here is more complicated example: for obj in gen: # do something with the `obj` if predicate(obj): try: result = f(obj) except Exception as e: log(e) continue else: result = g(obj) # do something useful with the `result` else: result = h(obj) display(result) I go through elements of some generator gen, process them and perform some actions on the result on each iteration. Then I want to do something with the last result outside of the loop. Is it pythonic enough to not assign a dummy value to the result beforehand? Doesn't this make the code less readable? Is it good to initialize variables inside if/else/for/etc. in Python? Continue reading...
