[Python-Dev] Explicit Lexical Scoping (pre-PEP?) (original) (raw)

Matthew Barnes mbarnes at redhat.com
Tue Jul 11 05:52:28 CEST 2006

On Mon, 2006-07-10 at 16:43 -0400, Jeremy Hylton wrote:

To express this email in the positive form: 1. Reserved words should be real words. 2. The meaning of the word should be clear. 3. "Put statements in positive form." (Strunk & White) 4. The word should sound good.

As I've been following this thread I find that the word "extern" keeps coming to mind. It's debatable whether "extern" passes #1, although my dictionary has an entry for it. But more importantly, there seems to be fairly strong parallels between what we're discussing here and its meaning in C/C++ (i.e. the symbol is defined outside of the current scope). So I think "extern" easily passes #2 for C/C++ programmers, and I think others can probably guess that extern == external (my wife did, at least).

I haven't seen this suggested yet so I thought I'd just throw it out there.

Matt

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