On Fri, 29 Apr 2005, Phillip J. Eby wrote:
At 08:21 PM 4/29/05 -0500, Ka-Ping Yee wrote:
All the statements in Python are associated with keywords, except for assignment, which is simple and extremely common. I don't think the block statement is simple enough or common enough for that; its semantics are much too significant to be flagged only by a little punctuation mark like a colon.
Don't forget the 'as' clause.
It's optional, and you have to skip an arbitrarily long expression to get to it.
if there is a distinctive keyword, a Python programmer who comes across this unfamiliar construct will be able to ask someone "What does this 'spam' keyword mean?" or can search on Google for "Python spam" to find out what it means. Without a keyword, they're out of luck. Names are power.
help(synchronized) or help(retry) would doubtless display useful information.
The programmer who writes the function used to introduce a block can hardly be relied upon to explain the language semantics. We don't expect the docstring of every class to repeat an explanation of Python classes, for example. The language reference manual is for that; it's a different level of documentation.
Conversely, try Googling for Python's "for" or "if" keywords, and see if you get anything useful -- I didn't.
I tried some of my favourite Python keywords :) and found that the following searches all successfully turn up information on the associated kinds of Python statements in the first couple of hits: python if python else python del python while python assert python yield python break python continue python pass python raise python try python finally python class python for statement python return statement python print statement -- ?!ng