31 Mar
2004
31 Mar
'04
5:42 p.m.
Taking the prefix position as given for the moment, why overload list literal syntax versus something currently illegal and meaningless? Such as
<decorator> # almost as easy, or
Yes. This looks better and will make it more clear that it's a special case. Otherwise the decorators will look too decoupled from the function.
Why does <...> look better than [...]? To me, <...> just reminds me of XML, which is totally the wrong association. There are several parsing problems with <...>: the lexer doesn't see < and > as matched brackets, so you won't be able to break lines without using a backslash, and the closing > is ambiguous -- it might be a comparison operator. --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)