I'll take this opportunity to pipe in with a response, since Guido summed up the many issues nicely and its a good bouncing point to mention my own thoughts.
On 2/12/07, Guido van Rossum <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > My perspective: > > - There's a lot of support for the basic idea, and only a few > naysayers, so let's keep looking for a syntax that works. > > - There's near-universal dislike for the two-arg form, so let's drop > that part of the proposal. > > - I can't recall that x.[y] has been proposed yet, but thinking about > it, that actually makes more sense than x.(y). (In fact, in JavaScript > you can write x[y] to the same effect. I wouldn't discount the JS > example; JS is probably closer to Python than almost any other > language currently in existence except for Boo, and JS has > successfully borrowed from Python.) I'll second that. The JS case is valuable and a good representation of the mindset behind using foo.[bar] > - I'm not too concerned by the '.' being such a small character with > this new proposal. x[y] is a lot less common than x(y), so you'll look > twice when you think you see x[y] and it doesn't make sense, and then > you'll notice it's really x.[y], which you either know or don't, and > in the latter case you'll be looking it up or asking around. I definitely see the downside of using the nearly invisible . here. Looking like dirt on the screen, being misunderstood, deleted because someone thought it was a typo, etc. could all be problems. I am not convinced they will be problems, only that they could. Now, do we need a more readable attribute deference or is there some optimizational need to make a syntax specifically for it? Why can't we just wrap the object in question with some attribute lookup type? attr(o)[methodname]() vs o.[methodname]() I think if you read those two, at a quick glance the first is a lot more readable than the second. It also has the advantage of not modifying the language syntax, or introducing nearly as much new code. -- Read my blog! I depend on your acceptance of my opinion! I am interesting! http://ironfroggy-code.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ 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
