On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 6:33 PM Greg Ewing <greg.ewing@canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
Why is this being proposed?
I think we would need a very strong reason to consider this, and so far I haven't seen any justification other than "because we can".
There was definitely something of that... I was looking at the new PEG parser and realized that *if people wanted it* this would be easy to do. So I spent a pleasant hour or two coding it up to my satisfaction. But I was also trying to satisfy some demand. When Python 3 was young, print becoming a function was one of the most frequent complaints, and it's still occasionally seen on Twitter. I found at least two StackOverflow issues about it, but the combined upvote count was less than 100. An early post in this thread reminded me that IPython has a feature called "autocall" that allows exactly this syntax. I don't know how popular it is. However, apparently there the form `f x+1` ends up calling `f("x+1")` (i.e. stringifying the argument), so introducing similar syntax in Python with different semantics would hardly be helpful. (If someone wants to start a debate on argument quoting, please start a new thread, so we can lay this one to rest.) All in all, it's clear that there's no future for this idea, and I will happily withdraw it. -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido) *Pronouns: he/him **(why is my pronoun here?)* <http://feministing.com/2015/02/03/how-using-they-as-a-singular-pronoun-can-c...>