[Jeremy]
> The access statement was experimental and went away. I guess it is
> the exception that proves the rule.
There are no exceptions to Guido's channeled rules <wink>:
no *advertised* experimental feature has ever gone away
and the access stmt was never documented ("advertised"). The closest it got
was its NEWS entry for 0.9.9:
* There's a new reserved word: "access". The syntax and semantics
are still subject of research and debate (as well as undocumented),
but the parser knows about the keyword so you must not use it as a
variable, function, or attribute name.
The "debate" mentioned there may have been limited to email between Guido
and (IIRC) Tommy Burnette.
> It was removed about the time I started using Python, so I don't know
> what it's intended use was.
access_stmt: 'access' NAME (',' NAME)* ':' accesstype (',' accesstype)*
accesstype: NAME+
# accesstype should be ('public' | 'protected' | 'private')
# ['read'] ['write']
# but can't be because that would create undesirable reserved words!
So it was for creating attributes that could be written by the public but
read only by class methods <wink>.
> Many of the Python 2.2 features are also labeled experimental. And I
> don't expect that they will go away either.
Well, at least not the ones we've told people about. Barry's hack to make
print << file, '%d' % i
read an int i from file may well go away.