Pythonification of the asterisk-based collection packing/unpacking syntax

[Eelco]

On Dec 26, 10:01 pm, Chris Angelico <ros... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 27, 2011 at 7:39 AM, Eelco <hoogendoorn.ee... at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Now try it without changing the subject from round braces to
> > everything but round braces.
>
> Around here, the term "braces" means the curly ones - { and } - that
> delimit blocks of code in C, and dictionaries/sets in Python.
> "Brackets" may be what you're looking for, if you mean all of ()[]{}.
> Or if you just mean (), they're called "parentheses".
>
> If your point is that parens are used more often than
> packing/unpacking, that's almost certainly true, since function calls
> (including method invocations) are so prevalent in pretty much any
> code. But what does that prove?

That proves the original point of contention: that the below* is
suboptimal language design, not because terseness always trumps
verbosity, but because commonly-used constructs (such as parenthesis
or round brackets or whatever you wish to call them) are more
deserving of the limited space in both the ascii table and your
reflexive memory, than uncommonly used ones.


*original mock code by steve:

class MyClass superclasslist A, B C:
    def method argumentlist self, x, y:
        t = tuple 1, 2 tuple 3, 4 endtuple endtuple
        return group x + y endgroup * group x - y endgroup