On Mon, 11 May 2015 09:39 pm, Antoon Pardon wrote: > There is no > a priori reason why we should turn "True" into a keyword and allow > "int" in the builtins.
Why should there be an *a priori* reason? There's no a priori reason why I speak English, instead of communicating through the medium of dance. Nevertheless there are many good, compelling reasons for speaking English (as well as some reasons that are best described as historical accidents). Might I be better off if I spoke Latin, Japanese or Klingon? Perhaps, perhaps not. Those are valid choices too, but they're not choices I have made. With programming languages, the designer can take the same route as Pascal or Java, and define standard functions as keywords that cannot be shadowed or redefined. Or one can design the language to be like Forth, where there are no keywords and literally everything can be redefined. Or one can take a middle-road, where certain syntactic elements, and a very small number of constant values, are made keywords, and everything else is free to be redefined. There's no a priori reason for any of those choices. But there are reasons. -- Steven -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list