Paul Rubin wrote:
Steve Holden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
[...] and if you think that newbies will have their lives made easier by the addition of ad hoc syntax extensions then you and I come from a different world (and I suspect the walls might be considerably harder in mine than in yours).
I'm saying that many proposals for ad hoc extensions could instead be taken care of with macros. Newbies come to clpy all the time asking how to do assignment expressions, or conditional expressions, or call-by-reference. Sometimes new syntax results. Lots of times, macros could take care of it.
Personally, given the requests in question, I'm extremely thankful that I don't have to worry about reading Python code that uses them. I don't *want* people to be able to make up their own control-structure syntax, because that means I need to be able to decipher the code of someone who wants to write Visual Basic as filtered through Java and Perl... If I want mental gymnastics when reading code, I'd use Lisp (or Forth). (These are both great languages, and mental gymnastics would probably do me good, but I wouldn't want it as part of my day-to-day requirements...)
Jeff Shannon Technician/Programmer Credit International
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