Some "pythonic" suggestions for Python

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Fri, 09 Nov 2007 11:41:24 -0500, Frank Samuelson wrote:

 
>> The ideas are
>> *never* fully thought out or materialized, and they invariably invite
>> scorn from the user community.
> 
> Of course, they're thought out:  They're stolen from another language.
> Specifically, the language in which I am most productive.

No, they aren't fully thought out *at all*. To wit: 

* you've suggested crippling tracebacks, throwing away the most important 
piece of information they currently provide, just because you don't like 
the def statement;

* you've suggested allowing sequences as indices into lists, completely 
unaware that your two suggestions for what it should mean are mutually 
incompatible;

* you've suggested getting rid of the slice syntax for no advantage;

* you've suggested making the function constructor itself a function, and 
seem to be completely unaware that your request would need a very 
different syntax to that Python already uses; 

* you suggest two different versions for the function constructor, one 
that is an expression and one that is a suite, but judging by your 
comments you don't even realize they are two different versions.


Need I go on?


If you want your suggestions to be taken seriously, you need to think 
them through carefully. Well-designed programming languages are not like 
chop suey, where you grab whatever left-overs you have in the fridge and 
mix them all together because you like the individual ingredients.



-- 
Steven.