New PEP: The directive statement

[Clark C. Evans]

On Tue, 20 Mar 2001, Martin von Loewis wrote:
>     A directive_statement is a statement of the form
> 
>         directive_statement: 'directive' NAME [atom] [';'] NEWLINE
> 
...

>     Introducing 'directive' as a new keyword might cause
>     incompatibilities with existing code. Following the guideline in
>     [1], in the initial implementation of this specification,
>     directive is a new keyword only if it was used in a valid
>     directive_statement (i.e. if it appeared as the first non-string
>     token in a module).

I'm new to python, but why not have the module have a built-in
set of directives as a list?  As this could then be an attribute
of many different objects, including modules.

__directives__ = { 'transitional', 'nested-scopes' }