On Mon, 15 Dec 2008 03:21:21 +0000, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > On Mon, 15 Dec 2008 02:11:10 +0000, Lie Ryan wrote: > >>> So given the normal precedence rules of Python, there is no ambiguity. >>> True, you have to learn the rules, but that's no hardship. >> >> *I* know about the precedence rule, but a newbie or a tired programmer >> might not. He might want to reverse the truth value of argument b but >> instead has just reversed the whole expression. > > And? A newbie or a tired programmer might not know that a^b is bit-wise > xor instead of exponentiation, or that range(n) doesn't include n, or > even that len(alist) returns the length of a list. There's no limit to > the potential mistakes that are possible for a programmer who is tired, > inexperienced, intoxicated or just plain stupid enough. What's your > point? Are you expecting Python to be mistake-proof? > > There's a certain level of knowledge about the language necessary to > program effectively, and learning that "is not" is a single operator is > not particularly onerous.
I give up. It does not matter to me anyway. I was just expressing the preference that operators should be composed of a single word, especially since none of the other operators are multi-words (Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules). The only advantage of using 'is not' over 'isnot' is that we have one less keyword to deal with. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
