On Mar 23, 2016, at 6:37 AM, Chris Angelico
wrote: On Wed, Mar 23, 2016 at 9:04 PM, Michel Desmoulin
wrote: (Whether or not to make slice notation usable outside subscript operations could then be tackled as an independent question)
For itertools.chain, it may make sense to simply promote it to the builtins.
Same problem as with new keywords : it can be a problem with people using chain as a var name.
Less of a problem though - it'd only be an issue for people who (a) use chain as a var name, and (b) want to use the new shorthand. Their code will continue to work identically with itertools.chain (or not using it at all). With a new keyword, their code would instantly fail.
I enjoy using ``chain`` as a variable name. It has many meanings outside of iteration tools. Three cheers for namespaces. Many of Python 3’s changes versus Python 2 were to take the pure stance -- change special statement syntax to function calls, move a few builtins into appropriate modules. If chain were a builtin, we’d have someone suggesting it move into itertools.