On Dec 9, 4:53 pm, Steven D'Aprano <[EMAIL PROTECTED] cybersource.com.au> wrote: > On Tue, 09 Dec 2008 08:30:26 -0800, Aaron Brady wrote: > > The following are semantically equivalent: > > > I certainly wouldn't want something like PL/I, where "IF", "THEN" and > > "ELSE" could be identifiers. > > > I wouldn't want something like PL/I, where "IF", "THEN" and "ELSE" could > > be identifiers. > > "Certainly" adds emphasis. You don't just mildly not want something like > PL/I, but you really don't want it, so much so that you're amazed that > anyone might have thought you did.
I see. He was expressing amazement too. This is distinct from a similar case, "-1 on including it, but it has some advantages, and could be useful for other purposes." He thinks it's a bad idea all around, not just ill-suited to Python. > The English language is very un-Pythonic. It especially breaks "Explicit > is better than implicit" -- words have many implied connotations which > are not necessarily found in dictionaries. For example, a "wise guy" and > a "wise man" are not the same thing, even though a guy and a man are the > same. I can't attest to many other languages, but the same might hold true. It's the speakers, not the language. English also breaks 'Errors should never pass silently', though more so in large "I have the conch" gatherings, and less so in smaller numbers. If I end up at the wrong restaurant for dinner, that's the equivalent (analogue) of reading from uninitialized memory, or other silently passed errors. 'Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.' Italian breaks this one--- 700 irregular verbs! But the Esperanto community is growing... heh heh. English spelling is bad too: "if 'i' before 'e' and not after 'c': ...' It's not a fair fight though, between English and Python. There's no 'final say', that is, unifying vision, about what's legal in English. People will just talk. If everyone drops their articles tomorrow, English no longer has them. Perhaps you could compare Python to an audience to English with only one member. I guess I take 'complex' and 'nested' to be about the same. Back to topic, the 'eth' sound might be ugly to some humans. But that doesn't mean it's ugly to English speakers, let alone useless. I guess some people think the disjunction of 'useful' and 'ugly' is nearly empty. I think one of the things the Zen has going for it is its authors were (are) programmers-- they taste their own medicine. In naturally occurring large religions, the priests aren't peasants very often... though sometimes the prophets are. You could compare the Zen to 'folk wisdom' per se, rather than a religion (though the latter proclaims itself the former too often). Just because you defer to something, doesn't mean it's a religion. But if the content has drifted so far that Peters and van Rossum no longer follow it, it's a bad sign. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
