[quote] “y if x is None else x” is more readable than “x ?? y”. [/quote] That may be true. But then, many people coming to Python from other languages claim that our ternary if operator `value if cond else altvalue` is "unreadable". So maybe readability depends on what you are used to. With other languages using `??` I expect that people will soon consider `x ?? y` to be every bit as readable as `x + y` and `f(*args, **kw)`. In the 1990s, I was a heavy user of Apple's Hypertalk language, which used syntax like add 1 to x put the value of background field "Address" into address Do you think that's worth the extra typing? That's not a rhetorical question. The Hypertalk community loved Apple's verbose syntax, but even they used abbreviated syntax sometimes. Instead of comparing fake examples with variables x and y, we should look at [examples from real code](https://peps.python.org/pep-0505/#examples).