On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 8:57 PM, Bruce McGoveran <bruce.mcgove...@gmail.com> wrote: > These are terms that appear in section 5 (Expressions) of the Python online > documentation. I'm having some trouble understanding what, precisely, these > terms mean. I'd appreciate the forum's thoughts on these questions: > > 1. Section 5.2.1 indicates that an identifier occurring as an atom is a > name. However, Section 2.3 indicates that identifiers are names. My > question: can an identifier be anything other than a name?
Yes. For example: from a import b Here "a" is an identifier but not a name, as it does not carry object-binding semantics. > 2. Section 5.3 defines primaries as the most tightly bound operations of > Python. What does this mean? "Tightly bound" here refers to operator precedence. For example, we say that the multiplication operator binds more tightly [to the surrounding operands] than the arithmetic operator, because the multiplication takes precedence. This section defines that the most tightly bound operations in Python are attribute references, subscriptions, slices and calls; these always take precedence over other neighboring operations. > In particular, if an atom is a primary, what operation is the atom performing > that leads to the label "most tightly bound"? An atom doesn't perform an operation. The grammar defines that a primary can be just an atom, so that anywhere in the grammar that expects a primary, a simple atom with no primary operation performed on it can equally be used. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
