[Python-3000] More wishful thinking

[Thomas Wouters]

On 4/16/06, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
>
> On 4/15/06, Talin <talin at acm.org> wrote:
> > Another grab-bag of language ideas / wishes. Some of these are
> > items that have been raised before on other lists - I want to get them
> > written down so that they can be rejected quickly :)
> >
> > 1) I don't know if this is already on the table, but I sure would like
> > to be able to have more options as far as mixing positional and
> > keyword arguments.
>
> I agree. Please produce a patch that implements what you want.
>
> > 2) A suggestion which I've seen others bring up before is the use of
> > the * operator for tuple packing / unpacking operations, i.e.:
> >
> >     a, *b = (1, 2, 3)
>
> I'm not keen on this one, so I'm not inviting you to write a patch.
> But it's not terrible either; if some continent of old-timers agrees
> to add it, it could happen.


I actually have half a patch for this (and the keyword-only argument thing,
and some other generalizations of *seq and **mapping) lying around. Since it
isn't going in before 2.6 anyway, I wasn't planning on doing anything with
it until 2.5 is well and done. (I mostly started it to get to know the AST;
PEP 308 and 328 have since done the job.) I dunno if I count as an
'old-timer', but I'm sure I can convince some of you real old fogies that
it's a good idea. :)

The IETF requires working implementations before accepting an
> RFC into the standards track. We chose not to do this for PEPs. But I
> believe that PEPs written after the code has been written and tested
> can be much clearer on corner cases.


Absolutely a good idea (and also how I've generally done it in the past
myself.) Besides, code is easy, a PEP is a heck of a lot of work. It still
has to be done, it just won't have to be wasted so often.

--
Thomas Wouters <thomas at python.org>

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