rantingrick wrote:
I was thinking more about this comment and it occurred to me that Python does have user controlled data structures. Just because there is no "top level syntax" like ruby does not mean these do not exists.
Syntax is what it's really about, though. There's no clear dividing line, but when Guido says he's opposed to "user defined syntax" he's talking about things like Lisp macros, which let you effectively extend the grammar with new keywords and syntactic structures. Compared to that, Python's grammar is very much fixed. Anything you want to do has to be done within the existing framework of function calls, attribute references etc. If Python truly had user-defined syntax, it wouldn't have been necessary to modify the compiler to implement features such as list comprehensions and with-statements -- those features could have been implemented, with the *same syntax* or something close to it, in the base language. -- Greg -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
