In article <3AA96ED4-876E-11D8-A42F-0003934AD54A@chello.se>, Simon Percivall <s.percivall@chello.se> wrote:
On 2004-04-06, at 01.24, David Eppstein wrote:
Ok, then how about <decorator> def ... ?
'<' can't start an expression or statement currently, can it?
Yeah. I think that would look better. On the other hand ...
On 2004-03-31, at 17.42, Guido van Rossum wrote:
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.
Well, Mike Pall's long message "The Need for a Declarative Syntax" convinced me that some kind of bracketed prefix is the best location for these things, but I still don't like [...] because it already has a (useless) meaning, so declarators would pass silently in old Pythons. And the same objection applies to all other existing brackets. So, angle brackets seem like the cleanest remaining choice. Re the lexer, I don't see this as a big problem as long as multiple declarators can be handled by multiple <...> pairs. Re the ambiguity, I think comparisons shouldn't normally appear in declarators, so it's ok if they have to be parenthesized. -- David Eppstein http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/ Univ. of California, Irvine, School of Information & Computer Science