April 1, 2004
7:11 a.m.
Guido van Rossum wrote:
Why does <...> look better than [...]? To me, <...> just reminds me of XML, which is totally the wrong association.
I vote for << >>. The brackets and parens have too many meanings in Python already. <<staticmethod, foobar(baz)>> looks more like French than XML. ;)
<<...>> has the same practical problems as <...>: no automatic line breaking, >> is ambiguous.
Sorry. I forgot that ">>" is also an operator. ;) Anyhow, I just meant that if you find a pair of characters that are illegal today then many of the objections about abusing existing syntax would go away. Paul Prescod