On Wed, May 16, 2018 at 2:09 PM, Carl Smith <carl....@gmail.com> wrote:
If your position is that Guido shouldn't introduce keywords that are currently used as names at all,
Exactly -- which is why I'm wondering my no one (that I've seen -- long thread) is presenting the backwards option:
Any new keywords introduced will be non-legal as regular names.
\new_key_word
for instance.
Makes me think that it may have been good to have ALL keywords somehow non-legal as user-defined names -- maybe ugly syntax, but it would make a clear distinction.
how ugly would this be?
\for i in range(n):
\while \True:
...
pretty ugly :-(
But maybe not so much if only a handful of new ones....
Or is there another currently illegal character that could be used that would be less ugly?
I'm actually confused as to what the point is to the \ prefix idea for names:
* It would still require people to change their code when a new keyword was introduced
* It would be no easier / harder than adding a conventional legal character -- trailing underscore, or ???
* but now the changed code would no longer run on older versions of python.
I guess it comes down to why you'd want to call out:
"this is a name that is almost like a keyword"
Seems like a meh, meh, lose proposal to me.
OK, I see one advantage -- one could have code that already has BOTH word and word_ names in it. So when word becomes a keyword, a tool that automatically added an underscore would break the code. whereas if it automatically added an currently illegal character, it wouldn't shadow anything.
But a sufficiently smart tool could get around that, too.
-CHB