On Mon, 15 Dec 2008 03:21:21 +0000, Steven D'Aprano wrote:

> On Mon, 15 Dec 2008 02:11:10 +0000, Lie Ryan wrote:
> 
>>> So given the normal precedence rules of Python, there is no ambiguity.
>>> True, you have to learn the rules, but that's no hardship.
>> 
>> *I* know about the precedence rule, but a newbie or a tired programmer
>> might not. He might want to reverse the truth value of argument b but
>> instead has just reversed the whole expression.
> 
> And? A newbie or a tired programmer might not know that a^b is bit-wise
> xor instead of exponentiation, or that range(n) doesn't include n, or
> even that len(alist) returns the length of a list. There's no limit to
> the potential mistakes that are possible for a programmer who is tired,
> inexperienced, intoxicated or just plain stupid enough. What's your
> point? Are you expecting Python to be mistake-proof?
> 
> There's a certain level of knowledge about the language necessary to
> program effectively, and learning that "is not" is a single operator is
> not particularly onerous.

I give up. It does not matter to me anyway. I was just expressing the 
preference that operators should be composed of a single word, especially 
since none of the other operators are multi-words (Special cases aren't 
special enough to break the rules). The only advantage of using 'is not' 
over 'isnot' is that we have one less keyword to deal with.

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