Wrong reasons to enhancing the language

[Russell E. Owen]

In article <mailman.984971990.29857.python-list at python.org>,
 Carlos Ribeiro <carribeiro at yahoo.com> wrote:

>Le me try to summarize what I've seen on the past ten days or so on this 
>list, regarding the awful lot of "enhancements" proposed to the Python 
>language.
>
>1) Proposing "syntactic sugar" changes to make some particular code 
>constructions look better;

Somebody recently posted a well-written message supporting the following 
idea: a very good predictor of how easily one can write bug-free code in 
a language is the expressiveness of the language. This matches my own 
experience.

This suggests that clean syntax to express an idea can be a very good 
thing, if done carefully.

Of course changes can be bad. They may be inconsistent with the 
language, add too much complexity, or add pitfalls to the language. But 
if a modification is well designed and allows one to express an idea 
more naturally or simply (especially a common idea) then it may pay rich 
dividends.

I believe many of the improvements in Python 2.0 fall into the category 
of helpful improvements. I am more doubtful about some of the stuff 
coming up (including nested scopes, // and rational numbers), but we'll 
see how it works out.

-- Russell