"APL and Perl territory" means "use lots of punctuation characters in
somewhat cryptic ways, often combining several for a distinct semantics." I
did not mean "APL and Perl use those specific characters with the proposed
meaning."
On Thu, Jul 19, 2018, 9:39 AM Steven D'Aprano <st...@pearwood.info> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 18, 2018 at 08:05:56PM -0400, David Mertz wrote:
>
> > '??' and '?.' and ?[]' are really just marching
> > into APL and Perl territory. Yes, I know such operators exist in other
> > languages, but it feels very unpythonic.
>
> If these features exist in "other languages", and *don't* exist in APL
> or Perl, how are they marching into APL and Perl territory?
>
> Perl territory, like this perhaps?
>
> print "hello world\n";
> @days = ("Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday");
> print $days[0]
>
> Yes, I can see why we use "Perl syntax" as an insult *wink*
>
> Okay, okay, my examples are a bit unfair. I deliberately chose examples
> where the syntax is almost identical to Python's. Aside from the array
> and scalar sigils @ and $ the above could be Python.
>
> Tens of thousands of non-English speakers have had to learn the meaning
> of what might as well be meaningless, random sets of symbols (to them)
> like "class", "import", "while" and "True". If they can do so, perhaps
> we English-speakers should stop complaining about how hard it is to
> memorise the meaning of a couple of symbols like ??. Surely its no more
> difficult than learning the various meanings of ** and [] which we've
> already done.
>
> *Its just spelling*. If it is a useful and well-defined feature, we'll
> get used to the spelling soon enough.
>
> That's not to say that spelling is not important *at all*, or that we
> should never prefer words to symbols. But if the only objection we have
> is "this is useful but I don't like the spelling so -1" then that's
> usually a pretty weak argument against the feature.
>
>
>
> --
> Steve
> _______________________________________________
> Python-ideas mailing list
> Python-ideas@python.org
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas
> Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
>
_______________________________________________
Python-ideas mailing list
Python-ideas@python.org
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas
Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
