On 7/04/20 6:54 am, Guido van Rossum wrote:
I'm not sure that that was the conclusion. At the time the point was that we *wanted* all keywords to be reserved everywhere, an `as` was an ugly exception to that rule, which we got rid of as soon as we could -- not because it was a bad idea but because it violated a somewhat arbitrary rule.
I don't see it as an arbitrary rule, or at least no more arbitrary than any other language rule. Given that the rule exists, it's the exception that seems arbitrary. There's little justification for it other than "we only thought of using it as a keyword later". To reduce arbitrariness, we would either have to make *all* keywords context-sensitive, or come up with some principled way of deciding whether a given keyword should be reserved or not. -- Greg