In article <afub8ifbvf...@mid.individual.net>, Gregory Ewing <greg.ew...@canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
> Steven D'Aprano wrote: > > The downside is that if spaces are not argument separators, then you need > > something else to be an argument separator. Or you need argument > > delimiters. Or strings need to be quoted. Programming languages do these > > things because they are designed to be correct. Shell do not because they > > are designed for lazy users and merely aim to be "good enough". > > That's overly judgemental. In the environment where shells originated, > not being able to easily put spaces in file names wasn't considered a > problem. File names weren't thought of as names in the natural language > sense, but as identifiers in the programming sense. > > You don't complain that you can't put spaces in identifiers in a > Python program, do you? No, because that would require all identifiers > to be quoted somehow, which would drive you crazy. In the same way, > requiring all filenames to be quoted would drive shell users crazy. On the other hand, if you *wanted* to put a space in a Python identifier, you just can't. If you want to put a space in a file name in the shell, all you need do is put spaces around the name. Or, if you prefer, escape the space with a backslash. Oh, wait. This blows my mind... >>> f = Foo() >>> setattr(f, "x y", "xyz") >>> dir(f) ['__doc__', '__module__', 'x y'] I did not expect this to work. Not quite sure what I've created here. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
