[Python-Dev] syntactic sugar idea for {static,class}methods (original) (raw)

Michael Hudson mwh@python.net
13 Feb 2002 10:41:13 +0000

barry@zope.com (Barry A. Warsaw) writes:

>>>>> "MH" == Michael Hudson <mwh@python.net> writes:

MH> Some time ago, Gareth McCaughan suggested a syntax for MH> staticmethods. You'd write MH> class C(object): | def static(arg) [staticmethod]: | return 1 + arg | C.static(2) | => 3 Very interesting! Why the square brackets though? Is that just for visual offset or is there a grammar constraint that requires them?

Um, no big reason; they were what Gareth suggested, so I implemented that. He may have got the idea from the slides from one of Guido's presentations -- it was reading them that reminded me I'd done this and wanted to mention it here.

Note, though, that my patch allows an arbitrary number of expressions in the square brackets; in principle you can do things like:

def h() [apply, (lambda f:(lambda : f() + 1))]: ... return 1 ...

and have `h' be 2 (except that this caused an abort at the moment -- I must have missed something in my symtable code).

Not sure whether this is a good idea, of course, but allowing arbitrary expressions does actually make the compiling easier. Allowing arbitrary expressions without delimiters sounds like a bad idea, both for parsers and people.

I'd leave them out of the picture, unless you mean to imply that a list is acceptable in that position .

Well, it is, at the moment...

Cheers, M.

-- : exploding like a turd Never had that happen to me, I have to admit. They do that often in your world? -- Eric The Read & Dave Brown, asr