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

[Carl Banks]

Alex Martelli wrote:

> IBM (PL/I's inventor and rabid defender) found out the hard way that
> making the parser more complicated, slow and bug-prone in order to allow
> such absurd obfuscation was NOT a popular trade-off -- despite IBM's
> alleged monopoly power, PL/I is now basically dead while the older,
> crankier languages that PL/I wanted to replace, Cobol and particularly
> Fortran, are still quite alive (and with reserved words ALWAYS reserved
> -- like in C, Python, Java, C#, Haskell, and basically every language
> that's even halfway sensible;-).

Except Fortran doesn't have any reserved words either:

      PROGRAM KWDS
      REAL REAL,WRITE
      WRITE=1.0
      REAL=2.0
      WRITE(*,*)WRITE,REAL
      END

(Not sure whether it's true in Fortran 9x.)


Carl Banks