The reading I've done so far on Python 3 (alpha announcement, meta-PEP, some other PEPs) is generally encouraging, but there doesn't seem to be much on cleaning up the syntax, which has become uglier over time as features have been added on to an original syntax that wasn't designed to support them. It seems to me (from what little I've read--I admit that it's impossible to know for sure without experimenting quite a bit, for which I don't currently have the time) that new features such as multimethods might just make things more confusing (especially for newbies) in a lot of ways, without appropriate syntactic support.
Currently the most obvious example of this is Python 2.5's way of defining properties, which is ugly. leads often to writing of unnecessary code, and certainly doesn't make property code clear to a reader. Contrast this to the way properties (things that look like an instance variable but are actually bound to methods) are handled in Ruby and (IIRC, this also does a decent job) C#. On the other hand, it does seem that some new syntactic support for other features will be added, so perhaps I'm just missing whichever PEPs talk about going back and adding cleaner syntax for existing features...? Finally, another thing I've perhaps missed, but I can't see anything in what I've gone through, about correcting of of what I see to be one of Python's most long-standing really serious flaws, which is the lack of an official standard documentation markup syntax for writing documentation in code. This isn't even a matter of getting something developed, it's simply a matter of Guido and the Powers That Be bestowing their benediction on one of the several adequate or better documentation toolsets out there, so that more of us (slowly) start using it. Eventually this will result in work on the toolset itself, more people will be willing to use it, and there'll be a nice virtuous circle. Given how much more capable D'Oxygen is than any of the Python-specific solutions, I'd vote for D'Oxygen myself, but I'd prefer to have almost anything fill in this vacuum, rather than continue things the way they are. As I say, I don't get the time I'd like to put into reading up on Py3, so please feel free to correct, point out references, etc. etc. Thanks, Ken -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
