In <mailman.1531.1244920680.8015.python-l...@python.org> Jack Diederich <jackd...@gmail.com> writes:
>There is only so much room in the syntax for common cases before you >end up with ... perl (no offense intended, I'm a perl monk[1]). The >Python grammar isn't as context sensitive or irregular as the perl >grammar so mylist[1,2,3] so the "1,2,3" tuple is always interpreted >as a tuple and the square brackets always expect an int or a slice. >Not including special cases everywhere means there isn't a short way >to handle special cases but it also means human readers have to >remember fewer special cases. Perl and Python make different >tradeoffs in that respect. OK, I see: if Python allowed foo[3,7,1,-1], then foo[3] would be ambiguous: does it mean the fourth element of foo, or the tuple consisting of this element alone? I suppose that's good enough reason to veto this idea... Thanks for all the responses. kynn -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
