On 13/05/2018 19:19, Guido van Rossum wrote:
Please, imagine how you would write the documentation to explain this.As anyone still following the inline assignment discussion knows, a problem with designing new syntax is that it's hard to introduce new keywords into the language, since all the nice words seem to be used as method names in popular packages. (E.g. we can't use 'where' because there's numpy.where, and we can't use 'given' because it's used in Hypothesis.)
The idea I had (not for the first time :-) is that in many syntactic positions we could just treat keywords as names, and that would free up these keywords.
For example, we could allow keywords after 'def' and after a period, and then the following would become legal:
class C:def and(self, other):return ...
a = C()b = C()
print(a.and(b))
This does not create syntactic ambiguities because after 'def' and after a period the grammar *always* requires a NAME.
There are other positions where we could perhaps allow this, e.g. in a decorator, immediately after '@' (the only keyword that's *syntactically* legal here is 'not', though I'm not sure it would ever be useful).
Then, please, put yourself in the position of someone who teaches Python trying to explain it.
Regards
Rob Cliffe
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