[Python-ideas] What about allowing '?' in method names?

[Masklinn]

On 11 Aug 2009, at 19:33 , Georg Brandl wrote:
> Masklinn schrieb:
>> On 11 Aug 2009, at 15:25 , Arnaud Delobelle wrote:
>>> On 11 Aug 2009, at 11:43, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
>>> Steven D'Aprano <steve at ...> writes:
>>>>>
>>>>> What makes you think that the question mark is a clue-in that a
>>>>> yes/no
>>>>> answer is expected?
>>>>
>>>> AFAIK it is a widely-used convention in the Ruby world.
>>>> I'd even go as far as saying that it's quite pretty, as a
>>>> typographical
>>>> convention (not that other Ruby conventions are :-))
>>>
>>> Also in Scheme. (I think the question mark more or less replaces the
>>> 'p' suffix used in LISP).
>> It does, and Ruby's idea of using the "?" postfix for boolean query
>> (instead of an `is` or `is_` prefix) comes from there.
>
> But, and I believe that was Steven's point, it is no more than a  
> convention.
It isn't, any more than Python's `_` prefix convention, or its `self`  
argument for that matter. I'd heard the Python community was pretty  
big on smart conventions but I might be wrong.