Re: Re: print ambiguity

On Sat, Jun 26, 2004 at 04:04:44PM -0700, Mark Hahn wrote:
> When I saw this ambiguity I announced the idea as dead.

That's what I found...

> Then Paul switched his vote from no to yes and argued that that printing a
> tuple constant was a useless case.  You can always do "print((1,2,3))".  He
> also argued for not allowing just any function to be used as a command,
> which was my original proposal.  His proposal was that you had to specify
> that a function was "command-enabled".

I think the archive is incomplete, unless this is under a new thread
with an unintuitive title, because I didn't see any of this.

> 2) The command format is only allowed when used on a line by itself.
> 
>     x = print a, b, c  # not allowed
> 
>     print a, b, c  # ok
> 
>     x = print(a, b, c)  # ok

Laurent just said that one "exciting" use of this syntax was to make
userdefined keywords.  I don't see how this helps: if you want a keyword
like "object" or "with", you'd have to pass an entire block to it - does
this syntax allow that?  If it's just for things that can only take
simple expressions as arguments, why not just make a function?

(I vote no, but I guess I'm too late...)

Joe