On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 5:30 AM Steven D'Aprano <st...@pearwood.info> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 22, 2019 at 08:53:53PM -0400, Todd wrote:
>
> [I wrote this]
> > > I would expect %w{ ... } to return a set, not a list:
> > >
> > > %w[ ... ] # list
> > > %w{ ... ] # set
> > > %w( ... ) # tuple
> > >
>
> [Todd replied]
> > This is growing into an entire new group of constructors for a very, very
> > limited number of operations that have been privileged for some reason.
>
> Sure. That's what syntactic sugar is: privileging one particular thing
> over another. That's why, for example, we privilage the idiom:
>
> import spam
> eggs = spam.eggs
>
> by giving it special syntax, but not
>
> class Spam: ...
> spam = Spam(args)
> del Spam
>
> Some things are privileged. We privilage for-loops as comprehensions,
> but not while-loop; we privilage getting a bunch of indexes in a
> sequence as a slice ``sequence[start:end]`` but not getting a bunch of
> items from a dict. Not everything can be syntactic sugar; but that
> doesn't mean nothing should be syntactic sugar.
>
This is getting bogged down in details. Let me explain as simply as I can
why I don't think this is a good idea.
Everyone has a different set of things they want privileged with a new
syntax. Everyone has different things they consider to be "annoyances"
that they wish took less characters to do. And everyone who wants a new
syntax thinks that new syntax should the "one way" of doing that
operation. If we accepted every syntax everyone wants the language would
be unusable. We have to draw the line somewhere. For any new syntax I can
think of, it significantly simplified real use-cases, was more expressive
in some way, or made things more consistent.
This, on the other hand, does none of these. Getting a performance benefit
doesn't require a new syntax. So the only benefit this has is saving a few
characters once per operation, at the expense of being less flexible. And
again, if we made a new syntax every time someone wanted to save a few
characters the language would be unusable. So I just don't think this
reaches what is my understanding of the bar new syntax has to reach.
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