On Wednesday, June 10, 2020, at 19:14 -0500, Chris Angelico wrote:
On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 10:08 AM Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> wrote:
One thing that the PEG parser makes possible in about 20 lines of code is something not entirely different from the old print statement. I have a prototype:
Python 3.10.0a0 (heads/print-statement-dirty:5ed19fcc1a, Jun 9 2020, 16:31:17)
print 2+2 4
But wait, there's more! The same syntax will make it possible to call *any* function:
len "abc" 3
Or any method:
import sys sys.getrefcount "abc" 24
A lot of people have been boo-hissing at this, but would it be possible to restrict it to just simple or dotted names (you mentioned that this part is possible), and only at the REPL? ...
I retrained my muscle memory moving from print to print(). I have almost zero use cases of passing end and sep to the function, although I did have a few cases of ending my print statements with a comma. I still think that print makes a better statement than an expression or a function call; YMMV. Okay, enough background. I, too, thought about the convenience of not having to type the parentheses at the REPL, but then I can't paste my code from the REPL into my program, and that's no good at all.
len("93e8a1b2688b3fc0dc413c182273a14f5dbd39a23d7845d363c5f9b98283ecaaa7a642578afe55442b7a00ae4ce335c7" ... ) 96
and I'm having to remember to put that close parenthesis on it, and it doesn't up-arrow correctly, etc, etc. Would be convenient to use the space syntax there.
Well, yeah, but that 93e8a1b2688b3fc0dc413c182273a14f5dbd39a23d7845d363c5f9b98283ecaaa7a642578afe55442b7a00ae4ce335c7 probably came from your clipboard (and it's still there, or still sitting in a terminal window, or ...), so even if you had to retype/paste the whole thing, it's not too bad. And who has the time to retrain the "len" muscle memory *not* to type the parentheses? ;-)