Now that it is valid in any expressions, I'd argue the repr should reflect the literal syntax. There are however some reasons this might not be desirable: ellipsis is used to represent recursive objects, and by reprlib when summarizing long reprs. Thus there would be ambiguity. A counter-argument may be that a repr isn't intended to be completely unambiguous, reversible or parseable - in deed many objects mimic the literal syntax of builtin types even though they add special behavior. I was going to give os.environ as an example here, and then learned this is no longer the case in Python 3, so maybe it is after all seen as undesirable. :) Anyway: discuss!
On Sun, Aug 7, 2011 at 2:33 PM, Mike Graham <mikegraham@gmail.com> wrote:
Interesting idea, but far too confusing in the interactive interpreter and in doctests: - '...' is also the default prompt for continuation lines (e.g. when defining a function) - '...' is used to mark 'match anything' sections in doctests The situation might have been different if the syntax had always been allowed everywhere, but there's no compelling reason to change it now. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia
On Sun, Aug 7, 2011 at 2:33 PM, Mike Graham <mikegraham@gmail.com> wrote:
Interesting idea, but far too confusing in the interactive interpreter and in doctests: - '...' is also the default prompt for continuation lines (e.g. when defining a function) - '...' is used to mark 'match anything' sections in doctests The situation might have been different if the syntax had always been allowed everywhere, but there's no compelling reason to change it now. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia
participants (4)
-
dag.odenhall＠gmail.com -
Guido van Rossum -
Mike Graham -
Nick Coghlan