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

[Michael J. Fromberger]

In article <10ia3aa8j6tbma5 at news.supernews.com>,
 "John Roth" <newsgroups at jhrothjr.com> wrote:

> "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:
> >
> > > 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]

Ah, I see.  I misunderstood your intent.  My apologies.

Nevertheless, I think it's clear the Python community at large ought to 
have a clearer idea of exactly what the use cases ARE (and, more 
importantly, what they're not) before deciding on a syntax.  It's not 
clear to me that there's consensus on purpose yet (as witness the wildly 
divergent ideas that have accumulated on the wiki, comp.lang.python, and 
python-dev).

Cheers,
-M

-- 
Michael J. Fromberger             | Lecturer, Dept. of Computer Science
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~sting/  | Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA