On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 8:08 PM Guido van Rossum <gu...@python.org> wrote:
> I believe there are some other languages that support a similar grammar
> (Ruby? R? Raku?) but I haven't investigated.
>
Lua has a similar feature: a name (including a dotted name or index[ing],
which are identical in Lua) immediately followed by a string literal or
table literal is syntactic sugar for calling the named function/callable
with that string or table as its only argument. This is commonly used with
print() and require(), and also is sometimes used (with table literals) to
simulate calling a function with named arguments.
Lua allows this to be chained: for example, the line `require "math"
"test"` is the same as `require("math")("test")`, calling the result of
`require("math") with the argument "test". (Incidentally, `require "math"`
returns a non-callable table, so actually running that will generate an
error message saying "attempt to call a table value". So it's a bad
example, but there are legitimate use cases for this.)
However, Lua only supports this for single arguments (two or more require
the parentheses) and only for an argument that is a string literal or table
literal, nothing else (in particular, numbers and names require the
parentheses).
_______________________________________________
Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org
To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org
https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/
Message archived at
https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/U42BCLKSM4PM2BBU6PLBLFZXRVMVUNI4/
Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
