I would like to propose a syntax that would explicitly be read as
"Create an object of Foo converted from object Bar". Being explicit,
as such, could bring about some interesting optimizations in the
future or immediately, and reduce redundant signatures (such as the
type(foo) syntax). I understand this is likely to be given some
negative comments, but I am interested in everyone's thoughts on the
idea.
# Coerce an object into its type
type from foo
# Create a list from some iterable
list from bar
Obviously you can see I propose the use of the 'from' keyword to mean
"create this from that". This would not translate directly to
type(foo) and list(bar), however, but would look for a new special
method, named '__coerce__', and would pass the original object to this
method to request a coerced instance of the desired type (or
interface). This special method, which is explicitly for coercing from
other types, can do more explicit things when we know exactly what we
are coercing, rather than just creating a new instance.
# Gives a mutable string interface to a file-like object
string from some_file
# Would create a new string, iterating over the file-like object
string(some_file)
# Where 'string' is some generic mutable string type.
The same syntax could be used to implement other things, such as
key-from-value operations:
# Get the first index of a value in a list
idx = 'b' from ['a', 'b', 'c']
assert idx == 'b'
In this example, 'b' would not have a __coerce__ method of its own as
an instance, and the list instance's __rcoerce__ would be called to
acquire the index.
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