On Mon, 26 Dec 2011 13:51:50 -0800, Eelco wrote: [...] >> If your point is that parens are used more often than >> packing/unpacking, that's almost certainly true, since function calls >> (including method invocations) are so prevalent in pretty much any >> code. But what does that prove? > > That proves the original point of contention: that the below* is > suboptimal language design,
Well duh. I was mocking the idea that the meaning of * is context-dependent is a bad thing by pointing out that we accept context-dependent meaning for round brackets () without any difficulties. Of course it is "suboptimal language design" -- it couldn't fail to be. Context-dependency is not necessarily a bad thing. > not because terseness always trumps > verbosity, but because commonly-used constructs (such as parenthesis or > round brackets or whatever you wish to call them) Parentheses are not a construct. They are symbols (punctuation marks) which are applied to at least three different constructs: grouping, function calls, class inheritance lists. > are more deserving of > the limited space in both the ascii table and your reflexive memory, > than uncommonly used ones. Right. And since sequence packing and unpacking is a common idiom, it deserves to be given punctuation. That's my opinion. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
