On Jun 10, 1:04 am, Bruno Desthuilliers <bruno. [EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> If you hope to get a general agreement here in favor of a useless > keyword that don't bring anything to the language, then yes, I'm afraid > you're wasting your time. Actually, what I hope to do is to "take something away" from the language, and that is the need to clutter my identifiers with leading underscores. I find that I spend the vast majority of my programming time working on the "private" aspects of my code, and I just don't want to look at leading underscores everywhere. So I usually just leave them off and resort to a separate user guide to specify the public interface. I'll bet many Python programmers do the same. How many Python programmers do you think use leading underscores on every private data member or method, or even most of them for that matter? I'll bet not many. (See the original post on this thread.) That means that this particular aspect of Python is basically encouraging sloppy programming practices. What I don't understand is your visceral hostility to the idea of a "priv" or "private" keyword. If it offends you, you wouldn't need to use it in your own code. You would be perfectly free to continue using the leading-underscore convention (unless your employer tells you otherwise, of course). I get the impression that Python suits your own purposes and you really don't care much about what purpose others might have for it. I am using it to develop a research prototype of a major safety-critical system. I chose Python because it enhances my productivity and has a clean syntax, but my prototype will eventually have to be re-written in another language. I took a risk in choosing Python, and I would feel better about it if Python would move up to the next level with more advanced features such as (optional) static typing and private declarations. But every time I propose something like that, I get all kinds of flak from people here who do their hacking and care little about anyone else's needs. With a few relatively small improvements, Python could expand its domain considerably and make major inroads into territory that is now dominated by C++, Java, and other statically compiled languages. But that won't happen if reactionary hackers stand in the way. Side note: I've been looking at Scala, and I like what I see. It may actually be more appropriate for my needs, but I have so much invested in Python at this point that the switch will not be easy. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list