[Python-ideas] Keyword/Symbol literals

[Chris Barker]

On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 11:38 AM, Alexander Belopolsky <
alexander.belopolsky at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 2:13 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org>
> wrote:
>
>> Lack of a use case?
>
>
> My use case comes from interoperability with other languages.  I maintain
> a package which provides an interface [1] between Python and the language
> [2] called Q.  Q has 3 scalar types to represent text data (char, byte and
> symbol) and the corresponding vector types.  When I pass Python strings to
> Q, I convert them to symbols because that is what users expect most of the
> time, but as a result, working with char vectors is unnatural.
>

couldn't you create a subclass of str that was exactly the same except that
it was defined as mapping to a Q symbol?

-Chris


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