gratuitous new features in 2.0

[Keith Ray]

In article <8od58h0rdo at news1.newsguy.com>, "Alex Martelli" 
<alex at magenta.com> wrote:

>"Grant Griffin" <g2 at seebelow.org> wrote in message
>news:39A9638D.CAE7308A at seebelow.org...
>    [snip]
>> It sounds to me like we primarily disagree on how grievous the issue of
>> adding new keywords is.  Personally, I don't think it's the worst thing
>> in the world. <"Practicality beats purity"; "readability counts">  So
>
>Practicality dictates not breaking good working code.  Python has
>managed to avoid new keywords for 6+ years; do you think that Python
>source code is unreadable because of that?!
>
>Breaking this excellent track record, particularly for the sake of
>a minor, debatable readability improvement to an absolutely marginal
>feature, would be a design decision of such abysmal quality as to
>defy belief; if it did happen, I would have to opine that meddlesome
>aliens have kidnapped our BDFL into their flying saucers, and substituted
>him with one of their minions, shaped to his superficial likeness.
>
>I'd MUCH rather the 'marginal feature' in question be placed in a
>function (or method), but if it absolutely HAS to be exposed as an
>extra feature of the print statement, then the "print>>" blotch is
>still heads and shoulders above the option of breaking good code.

What if 'print' and 'printto' were not treated as language keywords,
but as global identifiers, which could be overridden by user-defined 
identifiers?

-- 

       <http://pw2.netcom.com/~kjray/>