On 25Apr2011 14:26, Ethan Furman <ethan@stoneleaf.us> wrote: | haael wrote: | >First of all, many nouns are reserved, i.e. "object" or "class". | | Many? Aren't we still at less than 50 words total? Pretty | infinitesimal when compared with the 100,000+ words in the English | language. | | >Second: variable names are usually nouns indeed, but functions and | >methods are often verbs, while named parameters can be | >prepositions and adverbs. [...] | >Python kidnapped many verbs and prepositions and made them reserved. | | See above. This is a ridiculous exaggeration. Though to be fair, Python's using a fair number of the very heavily used ones. Personally I'm -1 on the proposal, especially the leading dot part. One downside that springs to mind is a weakness in C: the syntax is so... lexically complete... that quite often a syntactic programming error can get warnings about well below the actual error, and several easy mistakes are syntacticly valid and only show as logic errors later. The standard example is = instead of ==. My point here is that the more valid but mistaken forms the language allows, the easier it is for simple errors to become logic errors. Contrived examples: # getting the "as" name from "foo" from foo import as # but did I mean "from foo import this as that" ? # is this now a syntax error, since "as" is a name? with open("foo") as fp: Cheers, -- Cameron Simpson <cs@zip.com.au> DoD#743 http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/ The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node. - Vernor Vinge