Copy operator (was list.remove for Noivces)

[Fernando Pérez]

Arthur Siegel wrote:

> 
> What if we could help matters marginally, at no real cost?

Remember, nothing is free. If nothing else, every bit of syntactic sugar you 
add means extra complexity in the interpreter/byte compiler code. More 
codepaths, more possible bugs, more work to maintain it, possibly a 
performance hit from the added syntax analysis.

This doesn't mean that syntactic sugar should be banned, only that it should 
be *very* well justified. There's a reason why getting a PEP through is hard: 
because the ones who finally ok it are the ones who will have to actually 
live with maintaning the animal, not those who propose it. Life under the 
hood (in C) is a lot uglier than in the air-conditioned leather cabin of the 
interpreter (Python). And every pretty knob that lights up and makes music 
needs 55 more cables inside, so you see why the guys who do the cabling are 
reluctant to put 'another knob, in a different color and with a different 
song' :-)

Just some thoughts,

f.

PS: don't take this personally. My irony is not directed at you: we all have 
our list of 'things Python needs *today*'. I wrote mine when I started with 
the language,  but after a while I've realized there are very good reasons 
why things are the way they are, and why they change at the rate they change.