[Extracted from the psa-members list...] Gordon McMillan wrote:

Chris Fama wrote,

...

And now the rub: the exact same function definition has passed through byte-compilation perfectly OK many times before with no problems... of course, this points rather clearly to the preceding code, but it illustrates a failing in Python's syntax error messages, and IMHO a fairly serious one at that, if this is indeed so.

My simple experiments refuse to compile a "del getattr(..)" at all.

Hmm, it seems to be a failry generic error:

...

...

del f(x,y) SyntaxError: can't assign to function call

How about chainging the com_assign_trailer function in Python/compile.c to: static void com_assign_trailer(c, n, assigning) struct compiling *c; node *n; int assigning; { REQ(n, trailer); switch (TYPE(CHILD(n, 0))) { case LPAR: /* '(' [exprlist] ')' */ com_error(c, PyExc_SyntaxError, assigning ? "can't assign to function call": "can't delete expression"); break; case DOT: /* '.' NAME */ com_assign_attr(c, CHILD(n, 1), assigning); break; case LSQB: /* '[' subscriptlist ']' */ com_subscriptlist(c, CHILD(n, 1), assigning); break; default: com_error(c, PyExc_SystemError, "unknown trailer type"); } } or something along those lines... BTW, has anybody tried my import patch recently ? I haven't heard any citicism since posting it and wonder what made the list fall asleep over the topic :-) -- Marc-Andre Lemburg ______________________________________________________________________ Y2000: 61 days left Business: http://www.lemburg.com/ Python Pages: http://www.lemburg.com/python/