decorator syntax polling suggestion

Steven Bethard steven.bethard at gmail.com
Thu Aug 12 16:52:02 EDT 2004


The poll, as stated, asked voters to vote for the syntax suggestion
they liked the /most/.  Some of the conclusions people are trying to
draw from it are what syntaxes people liked the /least/.  This is
probably not the right conclusion to be drawing from the poll that was
given.

It is, however, the kind of conclusion I think we'd like to draw.  I'm
not sure we're going to agree fully on a single "best" proposal, but
it would help to get rid of any proposals that are overwhelmingly
dispreferred.  So I suggest a new poll of which syntax suggestions
people like the /least/.  I know that GvR is not interested in polls
(and probably rightfully so), so I suggest this only as a means of
directing our discussion -- if an overwhelming majority dislikes a
certain option, we can stop discussing it, and focus on the remaining
options.

I think it's also important not to limit the options so much.  I
didn't vote at the last one because I didn't like any of the options. 
I'd actually propose 4 different polls, based on the syntax breakdown
in the wiki:

Indicator:
* keyword
* symbol
* function
* none

Location:
* pre-def
* on same line, preceding def
* between def and function name
* between function name and argument list
* between argument list and colon
* at beginning of function body

List notation:
* one per line
* commas only
* as list
* as tuple

Indentation:
* indent decorators and def
* indent only decorators
* none

I think it should be pretty easy for us to throw out some of these
options pretty quickly.  (For example, I haven't seen much support for
"Location: between function name and argument list".)

Does this seem like a better polling strategy?  If so, can someone
post such polls somewhere?

Steve



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