On Fri, 5 Mar 2021 16:45:25 -0800
Guido van Rossum wrote:
> Good question. I don't think anyone has ever asked this before... Given the
> variants you propose, I'd say that the 3-character ones would be more
> effort to type without real benefits, and `=>` would at the time (and
> perhaps still :-) be seen as too close to `>=`.
>
> Could it be that there were already other languages using `->` for return
> types? I do know that we needed something there -- from the start I was a
> fan of `x: int` because it's the same as Pascal (the language I used most
> intensely in college), and if it had been syntactically possible I would
> have used 'def f(): int' for the return type as well, but the LL(1) parser
> in use in 1999-2000 would interpret that as a very short function body.
>
> It's also possible that it comes from the `->` operator in C, which would
> be the only "ASCII art arrow" that I was familiar with at the time.
Note that nowadays you can use `->` to denote function return types in
C++ (that was not the case in 1999, though).
It's also the only allowed style for anonymous functions ("lambdas"):
https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/function
https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/lambda
Regards
Antoine.
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