[Python-ideas] ScopeGuardStatement/Defer Proposal

[Guido van Rossum]

On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 3:57 PM, Nathan Rice
<nathan.alexander.rice at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Was that meant as an insult? Because it sounds to me like one.
>
> I'm sorry if my poor wording caused it to come across that way.
> Pascal was a very useful language, it with a perspective that was
> different than its contemporaries because it was originally intended
> for educational purposes, rather than as an academic language like
> lisp or a hacker tool like c or fortran.

I have no ideal how old you are, or what your background is, so I
don't know if you have all that from personal experience or from
hearsay.

I do know that for me, when I first learned Pascal on the Control Data
mainframe in 1974, it was the ultimate hacker tool. (Well,
penultimate. Assembler was the ultimate. But even then it was a last
resort.)

Pascal was also developed by an academic. I never got much out of
Lisp. So I guess it's a matter of perspective.

> I enjoy writing python a lot, and would prefer to use it rather than
> ruby/lisp/java/etc in most cases. My suggestions come from
> frustrations that occur when using python in areas where the right
> answer is probably just to use a different language.  If I knew that
> what I wanted was at odds with the vision for python, I would have
> less of an issue just accepting circumstances, and would just get to
> work rather than sidetracking discussions on this list.
>
> Thanks, and again, sorry!

I strongly recommend that you stick to describing your use cases and
tentatively exploring possible solutions, instead of trying to spout
sweeping controversial statements. Those just get in the way of
getting an exchange of ideas going.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)