On Fri, 29 Apr 2005, Guido van Rossum wrote: > The more I think about it the more I like having no keyword at all > (see other messages).
I hope you'll reconsider this. I really think introducing a new statement requires a keyword, for pedagogical reasons as well as readability and consistency. Here's my pitch: All the statements in Python are associated with keywords, except for assignment, which is simple and extremely common. I don't think the block statement is simple enough or common enough for that; its semantics are much too significant to be flagged only by a little punctuation mark like a colon. I can empathize with wanting to avoid a keyword in order to avoid an endless debate about what the keyword will be. But that debate can't be avoided anyway -- we still have to agree on what to call this thing when talking about it and teaching it. The keyword gives us a name, a conceptual tag from which to hang our knowledge and discussions. Once we have a keyword, there can be no confusion about what to call the construct. And if there is a distinctive keyword, a Python programmer who comes across this unfamiliar construct will be able to ask someone "What does this 'spam' keyword mean?" or can search on Google for "Python spam" to find out what it means. Without a keyword, they're out of luck. Names are power. -- ?!ng _______________________________________________ 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
