[Python-Dev] Is implicit underscore assignment buggy?

Thu Jun 8 00:04:27 CEST 2006

Raymond Hettinger wrote:
> When the result of an expression is None, the interactive interpreter 
> correctly suppresses the display of the result. However, it also 
> suppresses the underscore assignment. I'm not sure if that is correct 
> or desirable because a subsequent statement has no way of knowing 
> whether the underscore assignment is current or whether it represents an 
> earlier non-None result.

why would a subsequent statement need to know that ? are you sure you 
didn't mean "user" instead of "subsequent statement" ?
for users, it's actually quite simple to figure out what's in the _ 
variable: it's the most recently *printed* result. if you cannot see 
it, it's not in there.
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