[Python-Dev] Re: PEP 318: Decorators last before colon (original) (raw)

Fred L. Drake, Jr. fdrake at acm.org
Mon Apr 5 14:59:09 EDT 2004

Mark Russell suggested:

Would it not be possible to cheat and make the lexer transform

"[" WHITESPACE "as" WHITESPACE IDENTIFIER

into an LBRACE-AS token (which I assume would make the parser's job simple).

Guido said:

I don't think without extreme hackery, but feel free to prove me wrong by producing a patch. (A problem is, there could be newlines and comments inside the WHITESPACE. Backtracking over that would require the lexer to have an arbitrary-length buffer.)

Another possibility might be to require the construct start without the whitespace:

"[as" WHITESPACE ... "]"

That avoids the buffering issue and matches what most programmer are more likely to write anyway.

-Fred

-- Fred L. Drake, Jr. PythonLabs at Zope Corporation

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