[Python-3000] Set literal
Thomas Wouters
thomas at python.org
Fri Jan 25 19:39:44 CET 2008
On Jan 25, 2008 10:01 AM, Leif Walsh <adlaiff6 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jan 25, 2008 12:37 PM, Christian Heimes <lists at cheimes.de> wrote:
> > The pipe char is ambiguous because is no direction. It was suggested and
> > rejected last year.
>
> Out of almost-pure devil's advocacy, has <> been considered? My first
> instinct is that it would be ambiguous with less-than/greater-than,
> but if someone can convince me otherwise, might it work? After all,
> it's the only other balanced pair of punctuation I see on my keyboard.
>
Yes. And yes, even if the idea wasn't rejected, the parser wouldn't be able
to handle it. The same goes for |, too. The syntax would be ambiguous, and
Python's parser would not be able to ever 'close' a set, because the closing
character would be eaten by the expression inside the set.
set([1, 2, 1|2]) -> |1, 2, 1|2|
set([1>0, 2, 3]) -> <1>0, 2, 3>
For some situations, a more clever parser would be able to figure it out,
but there would still be purely ambiguous cases. And Guido has repeatedly
stated he wants Python to remain parseable by a simple parser, even if we
were to make CPython's parser more powerful. Weirder balanced-pairs have
also been suggested, and rejected (both because they don't improve the
readability and parsing situation, and because they just look absurd :)
--
Thomas Wouters <thomas at python.org>
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