[Python-Dev] Re: PEP 318: Decorators last before colon

[Mark Russell]

On Mon, 2004-04-05 at 19:59, Fred L. Drake, Jr. wrote:
> Another possibility might be to require the construct start without the 
> whitespace:
> 
> "[as" WHITESPACE ... "]"
> 
> That avoids the buffering issue and matches what most programmer are more 
> likely to write anyway.

I think that's probably too arbitrary a restriction.  Another thought:
presumably the parser could handle this syntax if "as" were a keyword. 
Is that true, and if so, is making "as" a keyword out of the question? 
The change could presumably be enabled by a "from __future__" directive
to avoid breaking existing code.

Mark