[Python-Dev] anonymous blocks
Brett C.
bac at OCF.Berkeley.EDU
Fri Apr 22 02:25:16 CEST 2005
Guido van Rossum wrote:
> I've been thinking about this a lot, but haven't made much
> progess. Here's a brain dump.
>
> I've been thinking about integrating PEP 325 (Resource-Release Support
> for Generators) into the for-loop code, so that you could replace
>
[SNIP - using 'for' syntax to delineate the block and resource]
> So I think that this is probably not the right thing to pursue,
I totally agree with your reasoning on this.
> and we
> might be better off with something along the lines of PEP 310. The
> authors of PEP 310 agree; under Open Issues they wrote:
>
> There are some simiralities in concept between 'with ...' blocks
> and generators, which have led to proposals that for loops could
> implement the with block functionality[3]. While neat on some
> levels, we think that for loops should stick to being loops.
>
> (Footnote [3] references the tread that originated PEP 325.)
>
> Perhaps the most important lesson we've learned in this thread is that
> the 'with' keyword proposed in PEP 310 is redundant -- the syntax
> could just be
>
> [VAR '=']* EXPR ':'
> BODY
>
> IOW the regular assignment / expression statement gets an optional
> colon-plus-suite at the end.
>
Sure, but is the redundancy *that* bad? You should be able to pick up visually
that something is an anonymous block from the indentation but I don't know how
obvious it would be.
Probably, in the end, this minimal syntax would be fine, but it just seems
almost too plain in terms of screaming at me that something special is going on
there (the '=' in an odd place just quite cut if for me for my meaning of
"special").
> So now let's assume we accept PEP 310 with this change. Does this
> leave any use cases for anonymous blocks uncovered? Ruby's each()
> pattern is covered by generators; personally I prefer Python's
>
> for var in seq: ...
>
> over Ruby's much-touted
>
> seq.each() {|var| ...}
>
> The try/finally use case is covered by PEP 310. (If you want to
> combine this with a for-loop in a single operation, you'll need PEP
> 325.)
>
> The use cases where the block actually returns a value are probably
> callbacks for things like sort() or map(); I have to admit that I'd
> rather keep lambda for these (and use named functions for longer
> blocks) than introduce an anonymous block syntax that can return
> values! I also note that if you *already* have a comparison function,
> Ruby's Array sort method doesn't let you pass it in as a function
> argument; you have to give it a block that calls the comparison
> function, because blocks are not the same as callables (and I'm not
> sure that Ruby even *has* callables -- everything seems to be a
> block).
>
> My tentative conclusion remains: Python doesn't need Ruby blocks.
> Brian Sabbey ought to come up with more examples rather than arguments
> why his preferred syntax and semantics are best.
>
I think I agree with Samuele that it would be more pertinent to put all of this
effort into trying to come up with some way to handle cleanup in a generator.
-Brett
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