"Mike Meyer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Magnus Lycka <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>> Terry Reedy wrote: >>> However, everything is an instance of a class or type. >> Except whitespace, comments, operators and statements! >> (Did I miss anything?) > [snip] Maybe the properly > refined version of Terry's statement should be: > > Everything you can manipulate is an instance of a class or a > type. Yes and no. First, the context of the statement was a previous claim that some things are class instances and some not. So my point in that context was a) that adding 'or type' changes 'some' to 'every' and that new classes mostly eliminate the difference between class and type, making the addition eminently sensible. So while I thought of a qualifier like that, I left it out as irrelevant and a distractions. Second, any qualifier I can think of seems to have the danger of confusing as well as enlightening. One might not realize, for instance, that functions are something you can manipulate and might therefore mistakenly think that the qualifier excludes functions. I also thought of putting it as 'everything in Python's dataspace ...', but that has the same problem. Perhaps 'every runtime entity...'. would work. That seems to excludes source code (and things within source code like comments and whitespace and operator symbols), unless the code or pieces thereof *are* turned into (or wrapped as) string instances. Names might seem like an exception, but again, they are only accessible at runtime as string instances. Or maybe a more direct statement 'except for source code, everything...' would be better. So I have so far not settled on a 'best' context-free statement of the design principle. Terry J. Reedy -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
