[Python-Dev] New syntax for 'dynamic' attribute access (original) (raw)

Anthony Baxter anthony at interlink.com.au
Mon Feb 12 08:50:35 CET 2007

On Monday 12 February 2007 18:38, Neil Toronto wrote:

Anthony Baxter wrote: > I have to say that I'm not that impressed by either the 1-arg > or 2-arg versions. Someone coming across this syntax for the > first time will not have any hints as to what it means - and > worse, it looks like a syntax error to me. -1 from me.

I'm not sure the "looks like a syntax error" argument holds much weight, because any new syntax is likely to be a syntax error until the syntax is changed. :)

Yes and no. My point is that it's extremely similar to existing syntax. (Worse yet, it looks the same but for what's possibly the smallest and hardest-to-see character in any character set)

"foo(baz)" vs "foo.(baz)" is... not good.

"No hints" is a decent argument against it, though. Parenthesis are already used for tuples, function calls, precedence, and generator comprehensions. The more something gets overloaded, the more ambiguous it looks. How about

obj.*strexpression instead? "*" is pretty common in the C family of languages as a dereferencing operator.

I don't know. This all still smacks of magic line noise to me :-) Although I should also add that after thinking about it a bit, I'm still not convinced this is something that needs shorthand syntax - particularly not one that's so line-noisy...

Hey, we could always use backticks in Python 3.0!

Anthony

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