Wonderful electric

Thankfully, I've fiddled with Emacs on Aqua and now I've got an electric slash in my minibuffer. Ooh err, missus.

Pattern Engines

In general, Python's refusal to treat an assignment as an expression is a Good Thing, cuz it prevents the dumb "if ( $x = "yes" ) { }" type errors that are oh so easy in Perl, C, whatever. Unfortunately, it makes the task of writing a text chomper a bit of a chore, since it's not possible to write:

for line in open("input").readlines(): if m = re.match("foo(\\d+)", line): print m.group(1) elif m = re.match("bar([a-z]+)", line): print m.group(1)

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