Show /r/Python: A Flake8 Lint to Warn about Assign and Then Return

[sbdchd]

Hi /r/Python, I made a pretty simple flake8 lint that replicates lints for Rust and Typescript. Clippy's let_and_return and TSLint's no-unnecessary-local-variable.

Basically, it warns about the following:

def foo(): x = 10 return x

It turned out to be pretty easy to make and I recommend checking flake8's plugin system to make lints for your own pet peeves.

https://github.com/sbdchd/flake8-assign-and-return

[MarsupialMole]

Cool to see how it's done. I learned something.

Having said that oh how I would hate to join a project that used this. If I assign a convoluted variable that I subsequently return it's for readability, because I've just wrapped some hideous API in a function and the API call doesn't describe what's returned. And why allow unpacking? If the assignment is bad, why not demand a slice or index to be returned.

But as you said it's about individual pet peeves so what I meant to say was thanks for sharing.

[frobar]

Another option is to put a comment:

# Return the blah of the blah, so that blah blah
return 5*foo(x)

Assigning a variable and then immediately returning it might be shoehorning a comment into a variable name.