John Nagle wrote:
Also, more compile-time arithmetic becomes possible.
But only if their values can be computed at compile time. This leads to a huge can of worms if you want to be able to import named constants from other modules. A large part of what currently happens only at run time would have to become possible at compile time as well. Either that or so many restrictions would have to be placed on the way that the values of named constants are specified that they would not be very useful in practice.
I think there's some religious objection to constants in Python,
Not religious, but pragmatic. What appears to be a simple and obvious idea on the surface turns out not to be nearly so simple or obvious in a language as dynamic as Python. -- Greg -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list