On Mon, Aug 17, 2020, at 14:00, Christopher Barker wrote:
From an implementation perspective, the [] operator is another way to call __getitem__ and __setitem__. And from that perspective, why not have it act like a function call: no arguments, positional arguments, keyword arguments, the whole shebang.
But from a language design perspective, the [] operator is a way to "index" a container -- get part of the container's contents. And from this perspective, no index makes no sense.
I think it makes perfect sense. Remember that numpy *currently* has a concept of "no index" [an empty tuple is used for this], it results in a view of the whole array, or the content as a scalar for a 0-dimensional array.
[I've occasionally been tempted to try the same thing on ctypes objects, incidentally, I think it might be useful to make obj[] equivalent to obj.value]