* Syntactic sugars for quick-and-dirty python programming.

sugar.py

@@ -0,0 +1,31 @@
+#!/usr/bin/ipython -pylab
+#
+# $Id: sugar.py,v 1.1 2010-01-22 18:46:50 wirawan Exp $
+#
+# Created: 20100121
+# Wirawan Purwanto
+#
+# Syntactic sugar for python programming. May not be efficient, but many
+# of these tools are nice for quick-and-dirty programming.
+# Beware of their caveats!
+#
+#
+
+def ifelse(cond, trueval, *args):
+  """An alternative to python's own ternary operator, but with multiple
+  conditions to test (like chained if-else-if-else... which is found in
+  e.g. m4 language).
+  This is of course only a syntactic sugar with its inefficiency and
+  dangers (all expressions are evaluated before choosing which one is to
+  select). So, beware!"""
+  if cond:
+    return trueval
+  else:
+    i = 0
+    while i+1 < len(args):
+      if args[i]: return args[i+1]
+      i += 2
+
+    if i < len(args): return args[i]
+
+  return None # Fallback solution: "None"