[Python-Dev] PEP 318 and syntax coloring

[Greg Ewing]

Skip Montanaro <skip at pobox.com>:

> Has anyone considered the side effect of any of these proposals would have
> on auxiliary tools like syntax-directed editors, other code colorizers, etc?

Yes, and those considerations point towards it being a bad idea to put
anything either between the 'def' and the function name, or between
the function name and the arg list. Doing either of those is likely to
break any existing tools that think they know what a function
definition looks like.

Teaching those tools about the new syntax could also be quite
difficult, since e.g. it may no longer be possible to express what is
being looked for using a regular expression.

So I think I'm against my own suggestion of putting the descriptor
decorator before the arg list. But I still think it may be worth
distinguishing it syntactically somehow, since it does something very
different from the others, and the user will have to know that.

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	   +--------------------------------------+