On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 5:05 AM, Laura Creighton <l...@openend.se> wrote:
<< snip >> > We're going to have to disagree about this one being 'just right' then. > That's OK. Another attitude / realization I tried to get across in the top thread of my post is: schools of thought exist within the Python community. "you'll find some polarization among Pythonistas about whether this is good style" I said. "Polarization" is a good word because we know you can't have left without right, up without down -- they define one another. To take another probably less controversial example, I believe PEP8 or one of those encourages always triple quoting docstrings. If I notice students making assertions like "doctstrings must be triple quoted" I go: """no, you *may* consistently always triple quote even single-lined strings, but unless you have those embedded linebreaks, "single quoted docstrings" are not an impossibility -- not a syntax error, not an oxymoron""" (that's a paraphrase; sounding more literal given I'm not plowing through at high speed here). I'm guessing few of us here always triple quote our docstrings. > > with atomic: > <these operations are executed atomically> > > see: > http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2011/08/we-need-software-transactional-memory.html > for more details. > This whole discussion was enlightening / educational, re additions to core Python. I'm tempted to change the subject line and do a branch on this. A proposal consistent with a permanent moratorium would be: yes, many dialects of Python, variants of Core, include the "with atomic" syntax, and you'll want one of those if doing multi-core programming -- unless of course you want to try PythonX by the team at Y, still experimental but.... etc. In other words, just because Core Python is innocent of the multi-core environment, doesn't mean we can't have five Not-Core Pythons that deal with it intelligently. Core Python becomes frozen, a kind of fossil, but there's just the one of them, the superclass. Then you have subclasses of Python-the-language that inherit and hearken back, but don't claim themselves to be Core anymore. No more fights. Just Diversity. You might see where I'm going with this: a version of Python with all keywords in Farsi for example. It's actually Core but with this one change. Rather than say we're running it through a translator, we're saying we have at least 300 new Pythons by the end of 2015, each in a different unicode language (when it comes to keywords). Of course many would decry this availability of multi- language Pythons and say it detracts from the universal readability of the One ASCII / English Core Version. But that's jumping the gun. Maybe only a tiny ethnic subculture of Farsi speakers use the Farsi one and so on, which the super-vast majority continue with the English core. So what? I'm just saying: it'd be useful to have the idea of "dialects" or "versions" well developed on many axes, not just one-core / multi-core. Kirby _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
