[Guido] > ... > I should also mention that this was inspired from some messages where Tim > Peters berated the fashion of using "reserved words", waxing nostalgically > about the old days of Fortran (sorry, FORTRAN), which doesn't (didn't?) have > reserved words at all (nor significant whitespace, apart from the "start in > column 7" rule).
The Fortran standards continued evolving, and still are, but despite that in many ways it's become a much more "modern" language, while it continues to add ever more keywords it _still_ has no reserved words. They have a strong reason for that: there are numeric libraries coded decades ago in Fortran still in use, which nobody understands anymore, so anything that breaks old code is fiercely opposed. If you think people whine today about an incompatible Python change, wait another 30+ years to get a sense of what it's like in the Fortran community ;-) I'm not sure people realize that Algol had no reserved words either. But that was "a trick" :-) Algol was originally designed as a formal notation for publishing algorithms, not really for executing them. Published Algol "code" always showed the language's keywords in boldface.. Similarly, the nearly incomprehensible (to me) Algol 68's 60 "reserved words" are essentially defined to be in boldface in the "representation" (for publication) language, but can also be used as identifiers etc. The intimately related but distinct "reference language" needs to be used for computer input. In that the reserved words are decorated in some way, to distinguish them from user-defined names of the same spelling. There's more than one way to do that, and - indeed - it's required that Algol 68 compilers support several specific ways. Anyone looking for more pain can get it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL_68#Program_representation Note that Perl largely (but not entirely) managed to dodge the problem by requiring a punctuation character (like $ for scalar and @ for array) before variable names. In addition to REXX (already mentioned), Prolog and PL/I had no reserved words. End of brain dump ;-) But I didn't suggest that for Python. It's a bit too late for that anyway ;-) It was more in line with what you suggested here: think more about ways in which reserved words _could_ be allowed as identifiers in specific contexts where implementing that doesn't require heroic effort. _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
