Brett C. wrote:
And before anyone decries the fact that this might confuse a newbie (which seems to happen with every advanced feature ever dreamed up), remember this will not be meant for a newbie but for someone who has experience in Python and iterators at the minimum, and hopefully with generators.
This is dangerously close to the "you don't need to know about it if you're not going to use it" argument, which is widely recognised as false. Newbies might not need to know all the details of the implementation, but they will need to know enough about the semantics of with-statements to understand what they're doing when they come across them in other people's code.
Which leads me to another concern. How are we going to explain the externally visible semantics of a with-statement in a way that's easy to grok, without mentioning any details of the implementation?
You can explain a for-loop pretty well by saying something like "It executes the body once for each item from the sequence", without having to mention anything about iterators, generators, next() methods, etc. etc. How the items are produced is completely irrelevant to the concept of the for-loop.
But what is the equivalent level of description of the with-statement going to say?
"It executes the body with... ???"
And a related question: What are we going to call the functions designed for with-statements, and the objects they return? Calling them generators and iterators (even though they are) doesn't seem right, because they're being used for a purpose very different from generating and iterating.
-- Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+ University of Canterbury, | A citizen of NewZealandCorp, a | Christchurch, New Zealand | wholly-owned subsidiary of USA Inc. | [EMAIL PROTECTED] +--------------------------------------+ _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
