A counter-proposal to __future__ in PEP 236

[Joshua Marshall]

Martin von Loewis <loewis at informatik.hu-berlin.de> wrote:
...
> In this implementation, directive is only considered as a keyword if
> it appears at the beginning of the module. Therefore, code that
> happens to use directive as an identifier will not break (unless it
> assigns to directive as the first thing in the module).

Note that it doesn't need to be implemented this way.  Currently,

  directive foo

is a syntax error.  Meaning can be assigned to this syntax without
breaking any existing code--it is unambiguous.