[Python-Dev] Python keywords (was Lockstep iteration (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido@beopen.com
Wed, 09 Aug 2000 19:12:59 -0500

[Skip laments...] > Could this be extended to many/most/all current instances of > keywords in Python? As Tim pointed out, Fortran has no > keywords. It annoys me that I (for example) can't define > a method named "print".

Sometimes it is worse than annoying! In the COM and CORBA worlds, it can be a showstopper - if an external object happens to expose a method or property named after a Python keyword, then you simply can not use it! This has lead to COM support having to check every attribute name it sees externally, and mangle it if a keyword. A bigger support exists for .NET. The .NET framework explicitly dictates that a compliant language must have a way of overriding its own keywords when calling external methods (it was either that, or try and dictate a union of reserved words they can ban) Eg, C# allows you to surround a keyword with brackets. ie, I believe something like: object.[if] Would work in C# to provide access to an attribute named "if" Unfortunately, Python COM is a layer ontop of CPython, and Python .NET still uses the CPython parser - so in neither of these cases is there a simple hack I can use to work around it at the parser level. Needless to say, as this affects the 2 major technologies I work with currently, I would like an official way to work around Python keywords!

The JPython approach should be added to CPython. This effectively turns off keywords directly after ".", "def" and in a few other places.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.pythonlabs.com/~guido/)