[Python-Dev] syntactic sugar idea for {static,class}methods

[Michael Hudson]

barry@zope.com (Barry A. Warsaw) writes:

> >>>>> "MH" == Michael Hudson <mwh@python.net> writes:
> 
>     MH> Some time ago, Gareth McCaughan suggested a syntax for
>     MH> staticmethods.  You'd write
> 
>     MH> class C(object):
>     |     def static(arg) [staticmethod]:
>     |         return 1 + arg
> 
>     | C.static(2)
>     |    => 3
> 
> Very interesting!  Why the square brackets though?  Is that just for
> visual offset or is there a grammar constraint that requires them?

Um, no big reason; they were what Gareth suggested, so I implemented
that.  He may have got the idea from the slides from one of Guido's
presentations -- it was reading them that reminded me I'd done this
and wanted to mention it here.

Note, though, that my patch allows an arbitrary number of
*expressions* in the square brackets; in principle you can do things
like:

>>> def h() [apply, (lambda f:(lambda : f() + 1))]:
...  return 1
...

and have `h' be 2 (except that this caused an abort at the moment -- I
must have missed something in my symtable code).

Not sure whether this is a good idea, of course, but allowing
arbitrary expressions does actually make the compiling easier.
Allowing arbitrary expressions without delimiters sounds like a bad
idea, both for parsers and people.

> I'd leave them out of the picture, unless you mean to imply that a
> list is acceptable in that position <wink>.

Well, it is, at the moment...

Cheers,
M.

-- 
  : exploding like a turd
  Never had that happen to me, I have to admit.  They do that
  often in your world?              -- Eric The Read & Dave Brown, asr