Guido van Rossum wrote: > On 7/5/06, Michael Chermside <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Guido writes: >> [discussion of how to fix the can't-bind-outer-scope-vars wart] ... > > Are there any other native speakers who side with Michael? >
A bit OT, but why should native speakers (eg of English) have special authority ? I mean this neither as an attack on native speakers nor as a rethorical question. I recently re-read the "sum()" discussion to figure out how it came about that sum() half bails out on sequences_of_sequences (by requiring me to specify the start value) except when the nested sequences are strings, in which cases it 90% bails out : by first asking for an adequate start value, and *then* - once I've provided it - telling me it understands my intent but that I should use ''.join instead. Is this a programming language shell or a text-based adventure game ? <0.8 wink> AFAICT, the cause of this funny strangeness is that a very respected member of pydev and native speaker of English with an truly unique sense of humor, found early in the discussion that sum(sequence_of_strings) "made his brain hurt"; and while this person is the very opposite of a newbie, his judgment was combined with concerns relating to newbies to result in the current behavior. I believe that in this case native linguistic intuition made the decision... and that a non-native intuition should have reversed it by noting in due time that the cognitive dissonance that native speakers could find to sum(seq_of_str), isn't in fact distinct from the cognitive dissonance that any newbie should find to the use of the + operator to concatenate strings or sequences rather than summing numbers. To restate, as a non-native speaker, and inasmuch "it hurts the brain" is the real reason against sum(seq_of_str) calling ''.join(seq_of_str) directly, I believe this is a case of excess authority being given to native linguistic intuition (of english speaking python experts) with the result of /adding/ to the cognitive dissonance of using + to concatenate strings (for all programming newbies). Best regards to all, Boris Borcic -- "On naît tous les mètres du même monde" _______________________________________________ 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
