On Fri, Jan 21, 2022 at 08:36:37AM -0800, Christopher Barker wrote:
On Fri, Jan 21, 2022 at 3:52 AM Oscar Benjamin <oscar.j.benjamin@gmail.com> wrote:
I really don't understand (having read everything above) why anyone prefers {1,2,3}.frozen() over f{1,2,3}.
Because it doesn't require any change to the language -- it's a feature, not a language change. Every change to the language is s substantial burden to the whole community. Even a "small" one like this.
The change from "" ASCII byte strings to Unicode was a substaintial change that lead to a substantial burden on library developers, at least in the short-term. Adding a new operator like `@` has been barely noticed. Out of the two extremes, I don't think that adding f{} displays would be closer to changing the meaning of strings than to adding the matmul operator. I do acknowledge that f{} would be perplexing to beginners who just saw it written down with no explanation or context, but then the same applies to slicing and list comprehensions.
Python is not a high-performance language -- has it ever had a feature added primirly so it could be optimized? (that is a serious question).
Maybe we should stop dismissing performance as unimportant. Nobody has ever said that Python is too fast. I was going to joke that nobody has ever asked "How do I make Python slower?", but sure enough somebody has: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16555120/how-can-i-slow-down-a-loop-in-p... *wink* I acknowledge that this specific change would likely be a micro- optimization, but looking beyond this proposal, perhaps we should start considering adding features specifically for performance? People are developing entire new Python interpreters and variants to improve performance, and have done so for many years. There is an impressive list of past and present such projects: - Cython - Nuitka - Pyston - Cinder - wpython - Hotpy - Unladen Swallow - Numba - Pythran among others. So maybe we should consider *not* saying "Python is fast enough", or "Just re-write it in C", and consider language features that are aimed specifically or mainly at performance. Just a thought to mull over. -- Steve