Hi guys, I've been using Python for some time now, and am very impressed with its lack of red tape and its clean syntax -- both probably due to the BDFL's ability to know when to say "no".
Most of the things that "got me" initially have been addressed in recent versions of Python, or are being addressed in Python 3000. But it looks like the double underscores are staying as is. This is probably a good thing unless there are better alternatives, but ... Is it just me that thinks "__init__" is rather ugly? Not to mention "if __name__ == '__main__': ..."? I realise that double underscores make the language conceptually cleaner in many ways (because fancy syntax and operator overloading are just handled by methods), but they don't *look* nice. A solution could be as simple as syntactic sugar that converted to double underscores behind the scenes. A couple of ideas that come to my mind (though these have their problems too): def ~init(self): # shows it's special, but too like a C++ destructor def +init(self): # a bit too additive :-) defop add(self, other): # or this, equivalent to "def __add__" def operator add(self, other): # new keyword, and a bit wordy Has anyone thought about alternatives? Is there a previous discussion on this I can look up? Cheers, Ben. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list