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On Wed, 12 Apr 2000, Paul Prescod wrote: About a month ago I wrote (but did not publish) a proposal that combined #pragmas and method attributes. The reason I combined them is that in a lot of cases method "attributes" are supposed to be available in the parse tree, before the program begins to run. Here is my rough draft.

Moshe Zadka wrote: BTW: Why force the value to be a string? Any immutable basic type should do fine, no??

If attributes can be objects other than strings, then programmers can implement hierarchical nesting directly using: def func(...): decl { 'zorb' : 'visible', 'spark' : { 'rule' : 'some grammar rule', 'doc' : 'handle quoted expressions' } 'info' : { 'author' : ('Greg Wilson', 'Allun Smythee'), 'date' : '2000-04-12 14:08:20 EDT' } } pass instead of: def func(...): decl { 'zorb' : 'visible', 'spark-rule' : 'some grammar rule', 'spark-doc' : 'handle quoted expressions' 'info-author' : 'Greg Wilson, Allun Smythee', 'info-date' : '2000-04-12 14:08:20 EDT' } pass In my experience, every system for providing information has eventually wanted/needed to be hierarchical --- code blocks, HTML, the Windows registry, you name it. This can be faked up using some convention like semicolon-separated lists, but processing (and escaping insignificant uses of separator characters) quickly becomes painful. (Note that if Python supported multi-dicts, or if something *ML-ish was being used for decl's, the "author" tag in "info" could be listed twice, instead of requiring programmers to fall back on char-separated lists.) Just another random, Greg