Paul Rubin wrote:
Well I for one disagreed with many of your estimates of the zen's applicability to macros, but I just couldn't be arsed saying so."Carl Banks" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
When I asked you to do this, it was just a rhetorical way to tell you that I didn't intend to play this game. It's plain as day you're trying to get me to admit something. I'm not falling for it.
If you have a point to make, why don't you just make it?
You asked me to compare the notion of macros with the Zen list. I did so. I didn't see any serious conflict, and reported that finding. Now you've changed your mind and you say you didn't really want me to make that comparison after all.
This is not a justifiable assertion, IMHO, and if you think that newbies will have their lives made easier by the addition of ad hoc syntax extensions then you and I come from a different world (and I suspect the walls might be considerably harder in mine than in yours).An amazing amount of the headaches that both newbies and experienced users have with Python, could be solved by macros. That's why there's been an active interest in macros for quite a while. It's not clear what the best way to do design them is, but their existence can have a profound effect on how best to do these ad-hoc syntax extensions like "where". Arbitrary limitations that are fairly harmless without macros become a more serious pain in the neck if we have macros.
So, we shouldn't consider these topics separately from each other. They are likely to end up being deeply related.
I don't really understand why, if macros are so great (and you are reading the words of one who was using macros back in the days of Strachey's GPM) why somebody doesn't produce a really useful set of (say) M4 macros to prove how much they'd improve Python.
Now that's something that would be a bit less ignorable than this apparently interminable thread.
regards Steve
PS: Your continued use of the NOSPAM.invalid domain is becoming much more irritating than your opinions on macros in Python. Using a bogus URL is piling crap on top of more crap.
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