[Python-ideas] Crazy idea: allow keywords as names in certain positions

[Rob Cliffe]

On 13/05/2018 19:19, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> As anyone still following the inline assignment discussion knows, a 
> problem with designing new syntax is that it's hard to introduce new 
> keywords into the language, since all the nice words seem to be used 
> as method names in popular packages. (E.g. we can't use 'where' 
> because there's numpy.where 
> <https://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy-1.14.0/reference/generated/numpy.where.html>, 
> and we can't use 'given' because it's used in Hypothesis 
> <http://hypothesis.readthedocs.io/en/latest/quickstart.html>.)
>
> The idea I had (not for the first time :-) is that in many syntactic 
> positions we could just treat keywords as names, and that would free 
> up these keywords.
>
> For example, we could allow keywords after 'def' and after a period, 
> and then the following would become legal:
>
> class C:
>     def and(self, other):
>         return ...
>
> a = C()
> b = C()
> print(a.and(b))
>
> This does not create syntactic ambiguities because after 'def' and 
> after a period the grammar *always* requires a NAME.
>
> There are other positions where we could perhaps allow this, e.g. in a 
> decorator, immediately after '@' (the only keyword that's 
> *syntactically* legal here is 'not', though I'm not sure it would ever 
> be useful).
>
>
This would not prevent code breakage when a new keyword was added. It 
would only reduce the amount of code broken.  Although in my 
unsubstantiated opinion not by very much; I suspect that most of the 
time an identifier is used in a module, it is used at least once in 
contexts where it would still be a SyntaxError if it were a keyword.
Rob Cliffe
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