[Python-Dev] Parrot -- should life imitate satire?

[Thomas Wouters]

On Tue, Jul 31, 2001 at 08:26:47PM -0600, Nathan Torkington wrote:

> I've been eyeing your 'import from the future' system of getting
> experimental features.  I'll be interested to see how this holds up.

It's really not that different form Perl's "use". They're both scanned for
by the parser/tokenizer, they're both used to change the semantics of an
operation, and they also double as a normal 'get and use a package'
operation (which is, in fact, the primary task of 'import' and 'use' both,
right ? :) The main difference is that changing the behaviour of the Python
interpreter is a lot less common than changing the behaviour of the Perl
one, and Guido wants to keep it that way. The purpously 'magic' spelling of
the future-import statement is part of that.

-- 
Thomas Wouters <thomas@xs4all.net>

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