[Python-Dev] Explicit Lexical Scoping (pre-PEP?)

Matthew Barnes mbarnes at redhat.com
Tue Jul 11 05:52:28 CEST 2006


On Mon, 2006-07-10 at 16:43 -0400, Jeremy Hylton wrote:
> To express this email in the positive form:
> 1. Reserved words should be real words.
> 2. The meaning of the word should be clear.
> 3. "Put statements in positive form."  (Strunk & White)
> 4. The word should sound good.

As I've been following this thread I find that the word "extern" keeps
coming to mind.  It's debatable whether "extern" passes #1, although my
dictionary has an entry for it.  But more importantly, there seems to be
fairly strong parallels between what we're discussing here and its
meaning in C/C++ (i.e. the symbol is defined outside of the current
scope).  So I think "extern" easily passes #2 for C/C++ programmers, and
I think others can probably guess that extern == external (my wife did,
at least).

I haven't seen this suggested yet so I thought I'd just throw it out
there.

Matt



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