Forgetting "()" when calling methods

[Tim Peters]

[Tim]
> I'm pretty sure that if Python had never supported meaningless
> (although consistent within a single run) comparisons, a compelling case
> for adding them couldn't have been made.

[Terry Reedy]
> Nor can I imagine a compelling case for exactly the current rules if
> they were not whay they currently are.  Allowing 1j to compare to '1'
> but not 1 is pretty exoteric.  The argument seem to be this: cmp(1j,
> '1') is so meaningless that it is ok to give an answer while cmp(1j,1)
> might be seen as meaningful (and lexicographically, it is) so therefor
> it must be forbidden.

No, the current state makes no sense.  In very early Pythons, it wasn't
*possible* (for technical reasons) for a comparison to raise an exception
(well, it could, but it got silently ignored).  When it became possible for
comparisons to raise exceptions, new types started doing so, but
pre-existing types generally didn't.  complex is a quirky exception.  It's
obvious that, in Python 3, Guido doesn't want

    2 < "42"

to pass silently any more than he wants

    2 + "42"

to pass silently.  The current state is an inconsistent mish-mash moving
toward that.