On Fri, Dec 4, 2015 at 12:25 PM, Steven D'Aprano <st...@pearwood.info> wrote: > I don't see any good reason for maintaining that there's just one > syntax, "display", which comes in two forms: a comma-separated set of > values, or a for-loop. The only thing they have in common (syntax-wise) > is that they both use [ ] as delimiters. They look different, they > behave differently, and only one matches what the list actually displays > as. Why use one term for what is clearly two distinct (if related) > syntaxes?
You come across something syntactic that begins by opening a square bracket, and you know that its semantics are: "construct a new list". That's what's common here. What goes *inside* those brackets can be one of two things: 1) A (possibly empty) comma-separated sequence of expressions 2) One or more nested 'for' loops, possibly guarded by 'if's, and a single expression So we have two subforms of the same basic syntax. The first one corresponds better to the output format, in the same way that a string literal might correspond to its repr under specific circumstances. Neither is a literal. Neither is a call to a constructor function (contrast "list()" or "list.__new__(list)", which do call a constructor). So what is this shared syntax? Whatever word is used, it's going to be a bit wrong. I'd be happy with either "constructor" or "display", myself. ChrisA _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
