[Python-ideas] with ... except

[Andrew Barnert]

> From: Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz>

> Sent: Friday, March 8, 2013 3:10 PM
> 
> Mark Hackett wrote:
>>  And it's so angocentric. How come the calls are to repeat *English 
> grammar*? German grammar would probably be a lot clearer for a 
> compiler/interpreter.
> 
> How about Latin?
> 
> http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.html


Come on, what's the point of using inflection to get rid of word order if you're not going to also use it to get rid of punctuation and grammatical function words?

For example, if you've got separate instrumental and accusative cases, you don't need "with". And with a distinction between the imperative mood and something else, like jussive, or mood modifiers that let you create something like conditional-imperative, you don't need "try". Thus, the entire issue that started this thread would never come up.

In a language without case stacking, there are limits to how far you can take this, but there are plenty of languages that have case stacking—or, better, full polysynthesis. With both pervasive argument incorporation and unbounded compound agglutination, an entire function body can be written as a single word. No more indentation rules to break copy/paste on blog comments, no more limitations to the one-line lambda, …

Latin is woefully insufficient. But Chukchi would work.