[Python-ideas] Make all keywords legal as an identifier

[Cameron Simpson]

On 25Apr2011 14:26, Ethan Furman <ethan at stoneleaf.us> wrote:
| haael wrote:
| >First of all, many nouns are reserved, i.e. "object" or "class".
| 
| Many?  Aren't we still at less than 50 words total?  Pretty
| infinitesimal when compared with the 100,000+ words in the English
| language.
| 
| >Second: variable names are usually nouns indeed, but functions and
| >methods are often verbs, while named parameters can be
| >prepositions and adverbs. [...]
| >Python kidnapped many verbs and prepositions and made them reserved.
| 
| See above.  This is a ridiculous exaggeration.

Though to be fair, Python's using a fair number of the very heavily used
ones.

Personally I'm -1 on the proposal, especially the leading dot part.

One downside that springs to mind is a weakness in C: the syntax is
so... lexically complete... that quite often a syntactic programming
error can get warnings about well below the actual error, and several
easy mistakes are syntacticly valid and only show as logic errors later.
The standard example is = instead of ==.

My point here is that the more valid but mistaken forms the language
allows, the easier it is for simple errors to become logic errors.

Contrived examples:

  # getting the "as" name from "foo"
  from foo import as
  # but did I mean "from foo import this as that" ?

  # is this now a syntax error, since "as" is a name?
  with open("foo") as fp:

Cheers,
-- 
Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au> DoD#743
http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/

The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on
every embedded node. - Vernor Vinge