[Python-Dev] Definining properties - a use case for class decorators? (original) (raw)

Phillip J. Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Tue Oct 18 06:35:19 CEST 2005

At 08:46 PM 10/17/2005 -0700, Guido van Rossum wrote:

Now, if I were to follow Paul Graham's recommendations strictly (http://www.paulgraham.com/diff.html), point 7 saysthat Python should have a symbol type. I've always maintained that this is unnecessary and that we can just as well use regular strings.

Well, unless you're going to also do #8 ("a notation for code"), I'd agree. :)

But then again, Graham also lists #6 ("programs composed of expressions"), and even though I'm often tempted by the desire to write something as a big expression, the truth is that most people's brains (mine included) just don't have enough stack space for it. The people that have that much mental stack space can already write lambda+listcomp atrocities for the rest of us to boggle at. :)

Logix (http://livelogix.net/logix/) basically adds everything on Graham's list to Python, and then compiles it to Python bytecode. But the result is something that still doesn't seem very Pythonic to me.

Of course, with good restraint, it seems to me that Logix allows some very tasteful language extensions (John Landahl created a nice syntax sugar for generic functions with it), but making full-tilt use of Graham's 9 features seems to result in a very Lisp-like experience, even without the parentheses.

At the same time, I would note that Ruby does seem to have an edge on Python in terms of ability to create "little languages" of the sort that Logix also excels at. Compare SCons (Python) with Rakefiles (Ruby), for example, or SQLObject (Python) to Rails' ActiveRecord. In each case, the Python DSL syntax is okay, but Ruby's is better. Even PEP 340 in its heydey wasn't going to improve on it much, because Ruby DSL's benefit mainly from being able to pass the blocks to functions which could then hold on to them for later use. (Also, in an ironic twist, Ruby requires fewer parentheses than Python for such operations, so the invocation looks more like user-defined syntax.)

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