On 07/04/2009, at 7:27 AM, Guido van Rossum wrote:
On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 7:28 AM, Cesare Di Mauro
<cesare.dima...@a-tono.com> wrote:
The Language Reference says nothing about the effects of code
optimizations.
I think it's a very good thing, because we can do some work here
with constant
folding.
Unfortunately the language reference is not the only thing we have to
worry about. Unlike languages like C++, where compiler writers have
the moral right to modify the compiler as long as they stay within the
weasel-words of the standard, in Python, users' expectations carry
value. Since the language is inherently not that fast, users are not
all that focused on performance (if they were, they wouldn't be using
Python). Unsurprising behavior OTOH is valued tremendously.
Rather than trying to get the optimizer to guess, why not have a
"const" keyword and make it explicit? The result would be a symbol
that essentially only exists at compile time - references to the
symbol would be replaced by the computed value while compiling. Okay,
maybe that would suck a bit (no symbolic debug output).
Yeah, I know... take it to python-wild-and-ill-considered-id...@python.org
.
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