On Fri, Jan 31, 2003, Guido van Rossum wrote:
David Goodger:
A standard function definition (simple, unadorned "def") is equivalent to:
def f as function: suite
In this syntax, where does the list of formal parameters go?
def f(spam, eggs) as function: suite
Also, this requires that the scope rules for the suite are exactly as they currently are for functions (including references to non-locals).
That's all fine and dandy, but then I don't understand how the poor implementation of property is going to extract __get__ etc. from the local variables of the function body after executing it.
Sort of. Each keyword can handle the thunk differently. For the property keyword, it'd be handled more similarly to a class. In fact, class then becomes def C as class: suite
This syntax could be used to remove a recent wart, making generators explicit:
def g as generator: suite
Of course, it would be a syntax error if the generator suite didn't contain a "yield" statement.
But then 'generator' would have to be recognized by the parse as a magic keyword. I thought that the idea was that there could be a list of arbitrary expressions after the 'as' (or inside the square brackets). If it has to be keywords, you lose lots of flexibility.
You allow both. The square brackets operate on the thunk (which is probably all that's needed for classmethod and staticmethod); different kinds of thunk parsing/compiling require keywords: def C as class: def foo(x) [staticmethod]: return x*2 def bar(self, y) as generator: for i in y: yield self.foo(i) def spam as property [classmethod]: def __get__(cls): ... The classmethod object would of course need to be able to differentiate thunk kinds, assuming you wanted to allow this at all -- but it doesn't require a syntax change to add class properties if they didn't exist.
What namespace these new modifier terms would live in, I also don't know. The syntax proposal reads well and seems like it could be a good general-purpose solution.
The devil is in the namespace details. Unless we can sort those out, all proposals are created equal.
The keywords go in the "defining thunk" namespace. -- Aahz (aahz@pythoncraft.com) <*> http://www.pythoncraft.com/ "Argue for your limitations, and sure enough they're yours." --Richard Bach