Draft PEP: string interpolation with backquotes

[Steven Majewski]

On Mon, 3 Dec 2001, Fernando [ISO-8859-1] Pérez wrote:

> What's wrong in this group every time someone suggests something that
> even remotely resembles perl there's a fanatic response to it? Cool
> down. I've used perl a lot, and am sick of it. I don't want python to
> become perl, but I simply keep an open mind to situations where in
> real, everyday work, I find it lacking.

I don't think it's specifically "Perlphobia" .

I think most pythoneers have learned to be conservative about
syntax changes, which means you not only have to make a good
argument for your feature, but you have to make a good argument
that the feature NEEDS to be implemented by a change in syntax,
and not implemented by a function (python or built-in) or a new
class or builtin-object.

> And I think the beauty of an open language is precisely that these
> discussions can be had. But obviously if everytime someone suggests
> something different (even if they are wrong) your response is to tell
> them 'if you don't like it get out of here', progress isn't exactly
> going to be very fast...

 You've made a pretty convincing argument about why it's a handy
feature, but I haven't heard an argument for why it requires
a new syntax (or new sematics for an old syntax).

 I would say that Python is not very 'syntactically open' --
certainly not in the way that Lisp or Forth is.

-- Steve Majewski