Python assignment operator differs from non assignment
So as the authors say this is not a bug. When you Do a += b
it is like b
come to a
's house and changing it the way that a
like it to be. what the Authors say is when you do a + b
it cannot be decided which one's style will get prioritized. and no one knows where will the result of a + b
will go until you execute it. So you can't decide whose style it would be. if it is a
style it would be [1, 'a']
's, and if it is b
style it would be an error. and therefore it cannot be decided who will get the priority. So I don't personally agree with that statement. because when you take the call stack a
is in a higher place than b
. when there is a expression like a + b
you first call a.__add__(self, other)
if a.__add__
is NotImplemented
(in this case it is implemented). then you call a.__radd__(self, other)
. which means call other.__add__
in this case b.__add__
. I am telling this based on the place of the call stack and the python community may have more important reasons to do this.
l += ...
is actually calling object.__iadd__(self, other)
and modifies the object in-place
when l
is mutable
The reason (as @DeepSpace explains in his comment) is that when you do l += {'a': 2}
the operation updates l
in place only and only if l
is mutable. On the other hand, the operation l + {'a': 2}
is not done in place resulting into list + dictionary -> TypeError
.
(see here)
l = [1]
l = l.__iadd__({'a': 2})
l
#[1, 'a']
is not the same as +
that calls object.__add__(self, other)
l + {'B': 3}
TypeError: can only concatenate list (not "dict") to list