[Python-Dev] Re: PEP 318: Decorators last before colon

[Fred L. Drake, Jr.]

Mark Russell suggested:
 > Would it not be possible to cheat and make the lexer transform
 >
 > 	"[" WHITESPACE "as" WHITESPACE IDENTIFIER
 >
 > into an LBRACE-AS token (which I assume would make the parser's job
 > simple).

Guido said:
 > I don't think without extreme hackery, but feel free to prove me wrong
 > by producing a patch.  (A problem is, there could be newlines and
 > comments inside the WHITESPACE.  Backtracking over that would require
 > the lexer to have an arbitrary-length buffer.)

Another possibility might be to require the construct start without the 
whitespace:

"[as" WHITESPACE ... "]"

That avoids the buffering issue and matches what most programmer are more 
likely to write anyway.


  -Fred

-- 
Fred L. Drake, Jr.  <fdrake at acm.org>
PythonLabs at Zope Corporation