[Python-Dev] Re: accumulator display syntax

[Greg Ewing]

> Did I miss April 1st? We seem to be discussing the merits of
>
>     f of arg
>
> as an alternative form of
>
>    f(arg)
> 
> While I'm sure Cobol had some good points, I don't believe that this was one
> of them...

No, some people were *abusing* my suggested accumulator
syntax for things that could have been done more directly
using a function call. It was not meant to be used for
copying or sorting!

I may have misled people a bit by using "sum" in one of
the examples, since there is currently a function by
that name, which wouldn't be directly usable that way.
Just to be clear,

  y = accum of f(x) for x in seq

would be equivalent to something like

  a = accum()
  for x in seq:
    a.__consume__(f(x))
  y = a.__result__()

which, as you can see, is rather more than just a
function call.

Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+
University of Canterbury,	   | A citizen of NewZealandCorp, a	  |
Christchurch, New Zealand	   | wholly-owned subsidiary of USA Inc.  |
greg at cosc.canterbury.ac.nz	   +--------------------------------------+