On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 4:09 AM, Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 7:55 PM, Joao S. O. Bueno <jsbueno@python.org.br> wrote:
On 16 May 2013 16:29, MRAB <python@mrabarnett.plus.com> wrote:
The suggestion was to use it in place of implicit string concatenation, which occurs only between string _literals_:
print ("Hello" . " World")
and is currently illegal ("SyntaxError: invalid syntax").
What is that? One thing that works in a way for literals and in another way for expressions? Sorry, but there is onlye one word for this: Insanity!
One of the things I love about Python is that a "thing" can be used in the same ways whether it's from a literal, a variable/name lookup, a function return value, a class member, an instance member, etc, etc, etc. (Sometimes this requires strange magic, like member function calling, but you still have the principle that "a=foo.bar(quux)" and "_=foo.bar; a=_(quux)" do the same thing.) So anything that makes str.str mean something weird gets a -1 from me. The proposals involving ellipsis have at least the virtue that it's clearly a syntactic element and not an operator, but I suspect the syntax will be more problematic than useful.
If it looks like an operator, it should BE an operator.
Just to point out that the "." is already overloaded in some cases in Python. Take a look at this literal: 1.2 Surely, that should mean the 2 attribute of the integer 1, correct?