P*rl in Latin, whither Python?

[Alex Martelli]

"Erik Max Francis" <max at alcyone.com> wrote in message
news:3A0DCD27.1B2D7416 at alcyone.com...
> Courageous wrote:
>
> > As an aside, in retrospect, I wish this weren't true. It would have
> > been
> > nice to be able to define variables like-this, or like-this? or
> > *like-this*.
>
> Huh?

Dylan (and LISP-based languages; Ruby, too, I think; I don't know
about others) let you put all sort of funky characters in identifiers.

It IS sort of nice to be able to name all predicates ending with '?',
all functions-which-modify-args ending with '!', etc.  The price you
pay for that is that you have to put spaces in LOTS of spaces
where they are not needed in "run-of-the-mill" languages (such
as Python) that severely restrict the set of characters usable in
identifiers.
    a+b      this would be an identifiers, so
    a + b    is what you must write for addition
etc, etc.  (LISP-ish syntax is different -- if no infix operators
exist, the space-around-operators issue of course disappears:-).

I guess this is what Courageous was perhaps referring to...


Alex