What is the most Pythonic way to provide a fall-back value in an assignment?

Question

In Perl, it\'s often nice to be able to assign an object, but specify some fall-back value if the variable being assigned from is \'undef\'. For instance:

my $x         


        

Answer 1

If it's an argument to a function you can do this:

def MyFunc( a=2 ):
    print "a is %d"%a

>>> MyFunc()
...a is 2
>>> MyFunc(5)
...a is 5

[Edit] For the downvoters.. the if/else bit is unnecessary for the solution - just added to make the results clear. Edited it to remove the if statement if that makes it clearer?