On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 8:55 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen@xemacs.org> wrote:

Andrew McNabb writes:

> > You're proposing that the "awful" workaround be made magical, builtin,
> > and available to be used in any situation whether appropriate or not?
>
> No, I'm not. That would look like this:
>
> >>> print('{spam} and {eggs}'.format())

Ah, OK, that's right. Just goes to show that foo(=spam, =eggs) is
really too confusing to be used. ;-)

I think you've just been reading all the mails in this thread of people claiming I eat children and worship satan :P

> > I'll take the explicit use of locals any time.
>
> I don't think anyone likes the idea of magically passing locals into all
> function calls.

My apologies, I didn't really think anybody wants "'{foo}'.format()"
to DWIM. The intended comparison was to the proposed syntax, which I
think is confusing and rather ugly.

Yet obviously people DO do stuff like:

_('{foo}')

which walks the stack to find the locals and then puts them in there. I think this shows there is some room for a middle ground that might disincentivize people from going to those extremes :P

Again, it's not about the exact syntax I suggested, it's about that middle ground.