Why re.match()?

[Bruno Desthuilliers]

kj a écrit :
> In <4a4e2227$0$7801$426a74cc at news.free.fr> Bruno Desthuilliers <bruno.42.desthuilliers at websiteburo.invalid> writes:
> 
>> kj a écrit :
>> (snipo
>>> To have a special-case
>>> re.match() method in addition to a general re.search() method is
>>> antithetical to language minimalism,
> 
>> FWIW, Python has no pretention to minimalism.
> 
> Assuming that you mean by this that Python's authors have no such
> pretensions:
> 
> "There is real value in having a small language."
> 
> 			Guido van Rossum, 2007.07.03
> 			http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-3000/2007-July/008663.html

There are some differences between "small" and "minimal"...

> So there.
> 
> BTW, that's just one example.  I've seen similar sentiments expressed
> by Guido over and over and over: any new proposed enhancement to
> Python must be good enough in his mind to justify cluttering the
> language.  That attitude counts as minimalism in my book.

And in mine, it counts as "keeping the language's evolution under 
control" - which is still not the same thing as being "minimalist". If 
Python really was on the "minimalist" side, you wouldn't even have 
"class" or "def" statements - both being mostly syntactic sugar. And 
let's not even talk about @decorator syntax...