On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 6:33 PM Greg Ewing <greg.ew...@canterbury.ac.nz>
wrote:
> Why is this being proposed?
>
> I think we would need a very strong reason to consider this,
> and so far I haven't seen any justification other than "because
> we can".
>
There was definitely something of that... I was looking at the new PEG
parser and realized that *if people wanted it* this would be easy to do. So
I spent a pleasant hour or two coding it up to my satisfaction.
But I was also trying to satisfy some demand. When Python 3 was young,
print becoming a function was one of the most frequent complaints, and
it's still occasionally seen on Twitter. I found at least two StackOverflow
issues about it, but the combined upvote count was less than 100.
An early post in this thread reminded me that IPython has a feature called
"autocall" that allows exactly this syntax. I don't know how popular it is.
However, apparently there the form `f x+1` ends up calling `f("x+1")` (i.e.
stringifying the argument), so introducing similar syntax in Python with
different semantics would hardly be helpful. (If someone wants to start a
debate on argument quoting, please start a new thread, so we can lay this
one to rest.)
All in all, it's clear that there's no future for this idea, and I will
happily withdraw it.
--
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
*Pronouns: he/him **(why is my pronoun here?)*
<http://feministing.com/2015/02/03/how-using-they-as-a-singular-pronoun-can-change-the-world/>
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