As an aside to the discussion about "nonlocal", here are a couple of
thoughts on backward compatibility.
For some of the proposed keywords, here's the number of occurrences
of the keyword in the current standard library (not including comments
and docstrings):
nonlocal 0 0
use 2 2
using 3 3
reuse 0 4
free 8 8
outer 5 147
global 126 214
(I used 'tokenize' to do this; let me know if you'd like me to count
other possibilities.)
This may or may not be a good measure of the likely impact of adding
a new keyword. At least it's something to think about.
It also occurred to me that this new keyword doesn't necessarily
have to break anything, if we are willing to tolerate a little
hackery in the Python lexer and parser. The situation is a bit
reminiscent of 'as' -- we were able to add 'as' to the 'import'
statement as though 'as' were a keyword, without actually making
'as' a reserved word in all code.
In this case, the usage of "nonlocal" (or whatever we choose) as
a keyword never overlaps with its usage as a variable name. The
parser could easily tell the difference by checking whether:
- The keyword is at the beginning of a statement.
- The keyword is immediately followed by an identifier.
If both of these things are true, then the keyword is a nonlocal
declaration. Otherwise, it can be treated as a variable name.
I'm not saying this is necessarily a good idea; i just wanted to
note that it was an available option. We might think about a
schedule for phasing in the feature:
Phase 1. If "nonlocal" is seen in code, issue a warning
that it will become a keyword in a future version.
Phase 2. Have the parser distinguish when "nonlocal" is
intended as a keyword and when as a variable name.
Phase 3. Make "nonlocal" an official reserved word.
All of these phases are optional -- we could skip straight to 3,
or do 1 and then 3, or stop at 2, etc.
-- ?!ng
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