[Python-ideas] Debugging: some problems and possible solutions

[Chris Angelico]

On Thu, Oct 4, 2018 at 4:54 AM Anders Hovmöller <boxed at killingar.net> wrote:
>
>
>
> >> Then I'm strongly -1 on it. Happy? :)
> >
> > And In case it's not clear why I said that, btw: It's not mere
> > pedantry.
>
> Good to see you understood yourself why that mail wasn't so good.
>
> > By restating your proposal in those terms, you make it far
> > broader than a simple textual transformation. Imagine if you'd said it
> > like this:
> >
> > "Okay, let's be pedantic. As well as my other proposals, I'm also
> > requiring that you be able to use 'a+b' as a variable name."
> >
> > That is most definitely not a simple proposal. And that means it
> > should be discussed as a much much broader change: disconnecting
> > keyword arguments from variable names. That should NOT just slide
> > through as part of a separate change.
>
> Imagine if I said something other totally irrelevant and that is bigger change indeed. But I didn't. I suggested not a change of CPython or PyPy or IronPython but a few sentences in a PEP. I also didn't suggest that it be snuck into the same PEP as my proposed syntax changes. I agree that would be bad. It should obviously be a separate PEP.
>

I'm not sure what you're calling irrelevant here. But sure. If you
want to propose that, propose it. Start a new thread in which you
propose that, as a language feature, kwargs are allowed to be invalid
variable names.

> I noticed you wouldn't take the bet too.

No, because the bet isn't the point. You're asking if any existing
Python implementation assumes that kwargs are valid identifiers. I
could easily create one and win the bet, and that still wouldn't be
the point. You're proposing a change to the language specification,
and that's not something to just gloss over.

When PEP 572 started proposing changes to other semantics than just
assignment expressions, there was a lot of pushback because that was
seen as an independent proposal (even though it was fairly tightly
bound to the assignment expressions themselves, in that it'd be
extremely hard to observe the difference else). What you're proposing
here is, similarly, a completely independent proposal, and not all
that tightly bound.

ChrisA