Terry J. Reedy <tjre...@udel.edu> added the comment: As I said on the python-ideas discussion, which definitely did *not* come to consensus, I disagree with this suggestion. To repeat and expand on what I said there:
1. 'unsubscriptable' could instead be changed to 'not subscriptable'. 2. 'subscription' *is* the way Python describes the use of []. """A subscription selects an item of a sequence (string, tuple or list) or mapping (dictionary) object: subscription ::= primary "[" expression_list "]" """ 'array subscript' (from C, for example) is a standard term used for decades in computer languages. It is appropriate since a[i] is one standard single-text-line replacement for a<typographic subscript>i when one cannot actually 'type' a subscript. It *is* a way of representing a subscript, just as i**j is an in-line way of representing a superscript exponent, which we still call an exponent in spite of it not being 'raised'. Both constitute visible markup that is part of the compromise in representing 2D typography with a 1D stream of characters. Using '/' for division (and fractions) is another. 3. Python error message generally do not and I think should not mention the special method implementation that underlies surface level errors. In this particular case, the remedy to mistakenly trying to subscript something is to not do that. I think mentioning __getitem__ would be a distraction. One generally *cannot* just go around adding it. ---------- nosy: +tjreedy _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue5760> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
