[Python-Dev] Reserved Characters

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Jim J Jewett wrote:
> One of the objections to @decorators is that it 
> will cause problems for applications that used 
> '@', simply because of it was one of only three 
> characters that *might* be available.

I personally believe that the set of characters
available to programming languages will extend beyond
us-ascii sooner or later. So the number of available
characters is several thousand.

> Newer String interpolation will also use up '$', 
> which leaves only '?'.

That is not true. $ will have a special meaning only
inside string literals. It can be put into string
literals already, so the lexical rules don't change
at all with that change.

> Is it time to reserve a character to the user, or
> at least to reserve some in certain contexts?  

I don't think so. People who desire to put additional
stuff into Python files should use Python comments.
Indeed, #! already has a special meaning on some systems.

Regards,
Martin