Hello,
On Tue, 23 Feb 2021 13:24:10 +0000
Stestagg <[email protected]> wrote:
> I was quite feeling pretty positive about the 'stab' (thanks Steve
> for this term!) operator idea, until I tried out some examples
> locally, and it just feels a bit too out-of-place in python, for me
> (100% subjective opinion here).
>
> Having used stabs and compact closure syntax in various languages:
> swift, c++, javascript, I'd assumed that the joy of just writing
> `c=>c.foo()` would translate well to python (sometimes lambda x:
> x.foo() just seems too cumbersome to write out, even if this is a
> lazy feeling, it's real). But, despite trying a few variants: ->,
> =>, different whitespace, etc.. , they all still felt non-ideal.
>
> I think the main difference, for me, is that the other languages that
> have adoped this syntax all rely much more on symbols (non-textual
> tokens) for control flow and structure. (braces, ternary operators,
> block syntax, etc..) so adding in another non-textual token that also
> has structural meaning feels natural. You're already 'reading' the
> symbols to understand what the language is doing, so there are no big
> surprises when stabs come along.
a) Python uses "non-textual tokens" for its operators too.
b) And from all the above, the opposite conclusion springs - while in
other languages "=>" would be lost in "character soup", in Python
it would stand out well enough.
> With python there are very few (any?) purely symbolic control flow
> tokens, and so I naturally expect words to be present to indicate
> what's going on. Suddenly there's a symbol that indicates a new
> control structure, and it risks getting lost in the noise.
"=>" is not a "control structure". It's a functional abstraction
operator. It takes an expression and abstracts it to a function. While
an expression is always evaluated "here and now", a function can be
passed somewhere else. All that stuff is from functional programming
paradigm. Thinking about it in terms of imperative programming
("control structures") may be not that helpful.
[]
--
Best regards,
Paul mailto:[email protected]
_______________________________________________
Python-ideas mailing list -- [email protected]
To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/
Message archived at
https://mail.python.org/archives/list/[email protected]/message/MM2SQCCSDQGXYGITRSYBISPYJ6NWS5ZI/
Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
