On 10/15/12 4:12 PM, bearophile wrote:
Andrei Alexandrescu:
Well there's a tension here: good language design generally aims at
providing few general features applicable to many use cases. Encoding
particular use cases in the language is warranted by either
disproportionate frequency in use or disproportionate difficulty in
implementing them within the language. I don't think this particular
feature scores very highly in either category.
It's a feature that I use about in every Python module/package I've
written, and it's about as equally used in code you see in Python
repositories. So it's a common need in Python. I'm asking for it for
more than three years or so.
I don't think that compares apples to apples, as the entire feature
combination present into either language must be taken into account.
And regarding the implementation my "hack" means having a single
compile-time constant (plus a switch to be used when you want partial
compilation?). Better designs are possible, but it's a matter of how
much you want to work for it.
I think for someone coming from Python, something akin to
if __name__ == "__main__":
main()
makes good sense. In my opinion that's not a design we should copy.
Andrei
