Are Python's reserved words reserved in places they dont need to be?

[Roy Smith]

In article <1hlkidf.fm1voc1b64uy5N%aleax at mac.com>,
 aleax at mac.com (Alex Martelli) wrote:

> metaperl <metaperl at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Diez B. Roggisch wrote:
> > > metaperl schrieb:
> > > >   -->  python -i
> > > >>>> class = "algebra"
> > > >   File "<stdin>", line 1
> > > >     class = "algebra"
> > > >           ^
> > > > SyntaxError: invalid syntax
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Why isn' t the parser smart enough to see that class followed by an
> > 
> > >  the few reserved words won't matter usually.
> > 
> > woe be unto the ORMs who try to map database columns to Python
> > attributes.
> 
> I'm gonna skip my usual anti-ORM rant, because there ARE valid case for
> "mapping external names to Python identifiers" -- e.g., remote protocols
> such as XML-RPC, automatic constructers of FF interfaces, etc.  Such
> code generators -- targeting ANY language currently alive -- obviously
> have to possess some minimal knowledge of the target language's syntax,
> and the obvious solution is to systematically transform identifiers
> which would otherwise be keywords.  The one most popular convention is
> to append an underscore -- so that 'pass' becomes 'pass_', and so on.
> 
> 
> Alex
>  

Also, keywords are only reserved in the context of identifiers.  They can 
certainly appear as string literals used as dictionary keys:

attributes["class"] = "algebra"