PEP 318: Can't we all just get along?

[John Roth]

"Michael J. Fromberger" <Michael.J.Fromberger at Clothing.Dartmouth.EDU> wrote
in message news:Michael.J.Fromberger-D24476.14010119082004 at localhost...
> In article <10i9msuatli5p84 at news.supernews.com>,
>  "John Roth" <newsgroups at jhrothjr.com> wrote:
>
> > "Kevin Smith" <Kevin.Smith at sas.com> wrote in message
> > news:20040817181725194-0400 at braeburn.themorgue.org...
> > > For what it's worth, I wrote the original PEP 318.  [...]
> > >
> > > In my opinion, none of the proposed syntaxes really seem Pythonic.
> > > This PEP just seems to be trying to solve too many problems.
> >
> > The arguement is, and always has been, about syntax. Everyone agrees
> > that the current situation is not ideal; putting the wrapping
> > assignment statement after the method is a very poor way of declaring
> > intent.
>
> I agree that the current situation is not ideal.  However, I would also
> argue that many of the proposed replacements are even worse.  Kevin
> Smith's latest proposal (cf. <http://shorl.com/bykaprifitrevi>) is, in
> my view, the most reasonable suggestion so far.
>
> > In other words, forget the use cases.  They're irrelevant.
>
> On this point, I strongly disagree.  If you don't have a use case, there
> is no point whatsoever in arguing about the syntax of a feature.

There is a use case. If you go back and read the original
post I was replying to, it contains the sentence:

[begin quote]
I guess others had bigger plans for my proposal that I had planned.  It
has turned into the "solution" to many problems: type checking (both
arguments and returned values), metaclasses, metadata, interfaces,
function attributes, etc.).
[end quote]

This is the context in which you should have taken my comment
to "forget the use cases." The original use case (classmethod
and staticmethod) is clearly still there, as my comments
in the post you reply to should have made clear.

John Roth
>
> Now, if you want to argue about general syntactic design principles,
> maybe that is an interesting topic -- but it is one level removed from
> what PEP-318 is all about, and therefore (in my opinion) not really
> germane to the present discussion.
>
> -M
>
> -- 
> Michael J. Fromberger             | Lecturer, Dept. of Computer Science
> http://www.dartmouth.edu/~sting/  | Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA