[Python-Dev] Reserved Characters (original) (raw)

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Fri Aug 20 22:12:10 CEST 2004

Jim J Jewett wrote:

One of the objections to @decorators is that it will cause problems for applications that used '@', simply because of it was one of only three characters that might be available.

I personally believe that the set of characters available to programming languages will extend beyond us-ascii sooner or later. So the number of available characters is several thousand.

Newer String interpolation will also use up '$', which leaves only '?'.

That is not true. $ will have a special meaning only inside string literals. It can be put into string literals already, so the lexical rules don't change at all with that change.

Is it time to reserve a character to the user, or at least to reserve some in certain contexts?

I don't think so. People who desire to put additional stuff into Python files should use Python comments. Indeed, #! already has a special meaning on some systems.

Regards, Martin

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