On Sat, Sep 26, 2020 at 5:11 AM Mark Shannon <m...@hotpy.org> wrote: > Hi everyone, > > I've submitted my PEP on syntactic macros as PEP 638. > https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0638/ >
Speaking as a former C developer, why do "We need to let the community develop their own extensions"? What's insufficient about Python's current extensibility? The complexity of a language varies with the square of its feature count, and adding macros intended for creation of domain-specific language features balloons the feature count. Granted, they don't much increase the complexity of CPython, the language implementation, but the de facto language then becomes more than CPython - potentially a lot more. That is, making it easier to extend python means a proliferation of extensions with little thought given to their long term viability or cross-domain compatibility. It's kind of like zsh vs. bash. zsh has a smaller implementation, but a larger _language_. For this reason, I'm not terribly interested in zsh, but I like bash. On the other hand, bash has seen a proliferation of unnecessary extensions in recent years, so I may jump ship to something else someday - something with a smaller language, that isn't afraid of fork+exec. I've used m4 before as a macro system for Python+Cython, but I would never consider suggesting that m4 should become part of Python itself. IMO Perl is dying because of its exuberant design. One of the most important things a language designer has to do is say "no" sometimes.
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