On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 10:04 AM, Bartosz Tarnowski <bartosz-tarnowski@zlotniki.pl> wrote:
Hello, guys.
Python has more and more reserved words over time. It becomes quite annoying, since you can not use variables and attributes of such names. Suppose I want to make an XML parser that reads a document and returns an object with attributes corresponding to XML element attributes:
elem = parse_xml("<element param='boo'/>") print elem.param boo
What should I do then, when the attribute is a reserver word? I could use trailing underscore, but this is quite ugly and introduces ambiguity.
elem = parse_xml("<element for='each'/>") print elem.for_ #????? elem = parse_xml("<element for_='each'/>") print elem.for__ #?????
My proposal: let's make a syntax change.
Let all reserved words be preceded with some symbol, i.e. "!" (exclamation mark). This goes also for standard library global identifiers.
!for boo in foo: !if boo is !None: !print(hoo) !else: !return !sorted(woo)
This would allow the user to declare any identifier with any name:
for = with(return) + try
What do you think of it? It is a major change, but I think Python needs it.
-- haael
I'm not a fan of this - I'd much prefer[1] that we use the exclamation point to determine scope: foobar - local !foobar - one up !!foobar - higher than the last one !!!foobar - even higher in scope We could do the inverse as well; if you append ! you can push variable down in scope. Jesse [1] I am not serious.