[Python-ideas] Statements vs Expressions... why?

[Cliff Wells]

On Thu, 2008-09-11 at 21:36 -0700, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 11, 2008 at 9:08 PM, Cliff Wells <cliff at develix.com> wrote:
> > I certainly agree that if I decided to move this beyond idle discussion
> > that a prototype would be a critical aspect and I fully expect there
> > would be many issues to be overcome.  I don't believe such a change
> > would be simple, but neither do I believe it's insurmountable.
> 
> Well, if you are asking for my personal opinion about the viability of
> this idea, I think it's not viable, but would like to be proven wrong
> (or right!) just so that this topic can be put to bed for good. 

Well, that was actually my goal in bringing it up here: I've got
something nagging me and the only way I'm going to put it to rest is to
hash it out in a roomful of devil's advocates =)

> I'm not swayed by the existence of Logix; it appears to be using a
> completely different way of interpreting whitespace, which seems
> incompatible with current Python, but they don't seem to give the
> exact rules, only some hints. Have you used it?

I've imported Logix into a Pylons session and used some of it's features
without issue.  It's quite probable that this may have only been
successful because Pylons itself was precompiled with CPython and the
only code affected was the particular module I was compiling at the
time.  

I'm curious which aspect of Logix' whitespace handling you suspect to be
incompatible (aside from the line-continuation stuff).  

In any case, as fascinating as Logix is, I find it mostly interesting
(to this debate) as an example of what such a syntax could appear like.

Nevertheless, I think I have a compromise: in lieu of writing an
interpreter, I'll investigate and properly document Logix (something
I've considered in the past anyway).  This way we can at least have an
implementation to argue over without me needing to quit my day job to
make a point ;-)

Regards,
Cliff