[Python-ideas] Accepting "?" as a valid character for identifiers

Ian Bicking ianb at colorstudy.com
Tue Nov 2 05:38:01 CET 2010


General impression:

? and ! are allowed in Ruby, which like Python is a multi-paradigm
language.  Despite the availability (from the beginning) they are still
inconsistently used in Ruby.  I attribute this to convention -- Ruby, like
any language, borrows from the experience of other programmers and other
interfaces.  Python is like Ruby but with years of extra history.  We can
never apply ? and ! consistently, and without consistency they are random
notations added according to the original programmer's history (i.e., when
they came from Lisp they'll use the punctuation, and when they come from
other languages they'll use nothing).

So... nice idea, but a couple decades too late?

-- 
Ian Bicking  |  http://blog.ianbicking.org
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