On Monday 20 October 2003 06:44 am, Greg Ewing wrote: ...
So, taking the original accumulator display idea, and incorporating some of the ideas that have come up along the way, such as getting rid of the square brackets, how about
sum of x*x for x in xvalues average of g for g in grades maximum of f(x, y) for x in xrange for y in yrange top(10) of humour(joke) for joke in comedy
Wow. I'm speechless. [later, having recovered speech] IF (big if) we could pull THAT off, it WOULD be well worth making 'of' a keyword (and thus requiring a "from __future__ import"). It's SO beautiful, SO pythonic, the only risk I can see is that we'd have newbie people coding: sum of the_values rather than: sum(the_values) or: sum of x for x in the_values We could (and hopefully will) quibble about the corresponding semantics (particularly for the top(10) example, implicitly requiring some "underlying sequence" to be made available while all other uses require no such black magic). But this is the first proposed new syntax I've seen in a long time -- not just on this thread -- that is SO pretty it makes me want it in the language FOR ITSELF -- to reinforce the "Python is executable pseudocode" idea!!! -- rather than just as a means to the end of having the underlying semantics available. I can but hope others share my fascination with it... in any case, whatever happens to it, *BRAVO*, Greg!!! Alex