On Sun, Apr 19, 2020 at 02:30:21PM +1200, Greg Ewing wrote:
> On 19/04/20 7:17 am, Alex Hall wrote:
> >there
> >is something about all these examples (plausibility?) that feels
> >distinctly different from your proposal.
>
> To me it seems like an unnecessarily complicated syntax that goes
> out of its way to look deceptively like something else.
Are we still talking about `**{identifier}`?
There are three tokens there: `**{`, an identifier, and `}`. Adding an
optional comma makes four.
If this is your idea of "complicated syntax", I cannot imagine how you
cope with function definitions in their full generality:
def name(arg, /, a:str='', *args, b:float=-0.0, **kw) -> str:
> > f(a, b, c)
> >
> > x = a, b, c
> > f(x)
> >
> >This imagined refactoring doesn't feel as plausible. A complete beginner
> >might think that they can do that, but a programmer who knows what
> >tuples are can reason that it doesn't make sense.
>
> Fun fact -- I gather there was a very early version of Python
> in which this refactoring *did* work. But it was quickly changed
> because people found it too confusing!
I can confirm your fun fact is true in Python 0.9.1, at least the first
part. I don't know if it was changed because people were confused, or if
they just didn't like it, or because it made it troublesome to pass a
tuple as argument.
> I think what's happening here is that long experience with
> other languages has ingrained in us the idea that commas
> separate arguments to a function without creating tuples,
> so when we see a comma-separated list in the context of a
> function call we instinctively think "argument list" and
> not "tuple".
>
> But there is no such precedent for the OP's proposal.
You just spent an entire paragraph describing such a precedent.
--
Steven
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