Re: Re: Re: Re[2]: Re: class proposal

Mark Hahn wrote:
> Christian Tismer wrote:
> 
>>And in Prothon the "!" or bang symbol has a meaning: 
>>change an object in place and return it. Have you noticed 
>>the append! for lists, etc.
>>
>>Yes, sure. It may make sense, but it is really ugly for me. 
>>Another thing I might put into an editor: Hide or unhide the 
>>decoration characters. They could show up as colors. I'd 
>>extend my proposal to also disallow coexistence of the 
>>decorated with the undecorated version. Ahem :-)
> 
> The ! And ? Characters in a name are not decorators, they are
> significant.  This is what allows us to have both File.open() and
> File.open?().

Well, the question mark makes some sense to me, looks
much friendlier than the shriek. Just a matter of taste.

In any case, open? does not look like an attribute name,
but like an attribute with a post fix operator, a little
like the getter/setter interface with computed attributes
in Python:

inst.alpha      calls the getter of the aplha attribute
inst.alpha = 42 calls the setter of the alpha attribute

but it is perceived as one thing. I would expect it as
some decoration, different ways to look at the same thing.

if not trousers.washed?
	trousers.wash()

this I can understand.

But why shoudl I ask  trousers.washed?()
And would it even exist without the (), probably yes,
this would give me the method object. Well, here Python
would use the trouser.__class__.washed unbound method.

> Python was forced to have file.closed().

Ho that? It was a decision. I would most probably have made
it into a computed attribute.

> Not only is it harder to tell
> which is a command and which is a question in Python, but you have the
> illogical negative-based question in Python.

Python has history, and computed attributes are not very old.
If they had a chance, they would probably not make this into
a method.again().

I see two different approaches here, one with special characters,
one with the design decision to use a call or implicit computaton
(and it has some historical problems of consistency), but I'm not
sure which one to prefer. There is nothing telling me that it is
*the right thing*(TM) now and forever, so why the change at all?
My first (and still lasting) impression was that it will not buy
you new users, but the opposite.

definately?(both).not.what.I!(want) -- ciao - chis
-- 
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