PEP 285: Adding a bool type

[David Eppstein]

In article <kupu1hple7.fsf at lasipalatsi.fi>,
 Erno Kuusela <erno-news at erno.iki.fi> wrote:

> since 1.5, i find the following changes to the language come
> immediately mind as worthy:
> - nested_scopes
> - string methods
> - unicode (maybe, haven't really used or needed it yet)
> - new-style classes (ditto)
> 
> the following language changes come immediately
> to mind as feeling superfluous:
> - list comprehensions (map/filter)
> - f(*args, **kw) (apply)
> - staticmethod/classmethod
> 
> i haven't decided if this is a good ratio or not, yet.

I came to the language after list comprehensions were already there, so 
maybe that changes the picture for me, but they're one of the things I 
really like about the language -- they don't do anything you couldn't do 
with a loop, but when they can replace a loop I think they can lead to 
much clearer code.

Nested scopes are also good, although it confuses me that they are 
read-only.  The other recent addition that I really like is simple 
generators.

I can't think of a language change that has made me very unhappy, but 
maybe I haven't seen enough of them to judge.  I was strongly opposed to 
the integer division thing when I first heard about it, but Guido 
convinced me that it was the right thing to do.

There's plenty of change I'm neutral or ignorant of, like most of the 
object-oriented infrastructure stuff.  What is staticmethod etc anyway?

So that seems like a very good ratio to me.

-- 
David Eppstein       UC Irvine Dept. of Information & Computer Science
eppstein at ics.uci.edu http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/