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

[Georg Brandl]

Masklinn schrieb:
> 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.

But what is the advantage of "?" to "is_" then?

Georg

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