On Oct 13, 2012 6:45 AM, "Devin Jeanpierre" jeanpierreda@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 10:41 PM, Steven D'Aprano steve@pearwood.info
wrote:
If I were designing a language from scratch today, with full Unicode
support
from the beginning, I would support a rich set of operators possibly
even
including MIDDLE DOT and × MULTIPLICATION SIGN, and leave it up to the
user
to use them wisely or not at all. But I don't think it would be
appropriate
for Python to add them, at least not before Python 4: too much effort
for
too little gain. Maybe in another ten years people will be less resistant to Unicode operators.
Python has cleverly left the $ symbol unused.
We can use it as a quasiquote to embed executable TeX.
for x in xrange($b \cdot \sum_{i=1}^n \frac{x^n}{n!}$): ...
I hope this was in jest because that line of TeX for general programming made my eyes bleed.
A PEP for defining operators sounds interesting for 4.0 indeed. Though it might be messy to allow a module to meddle with the python syntax.
Perhaps instead I would like it if all operators were objects with e.g. special __infix__ methods.
Yuval