Another way to spell __metaclass__ ?

[Bengt Richter]

On Sat, 14 Dec 2002 13:34:31 -0800, Erik Max Francis <max at alcyone.com> wrote:

>Aahz wrote:
>
>> This will never happen.  One of the design goals for Python is
>> syntactic
>> stability.
>
>Plus, I might add, in this day and age, if what you're really in is
>designing your own custom language, it probably makes more sense to
>write your own script -- perhaps even in Python -- which processes the
>custom language into some other language (perhaps even Python).
>
>That is, if what you want is language customizations, it often makes a
>lot more sense to just do them yourself and process to some other,
>non-customized language, rather than to ask that the customizations be

This relationship also applies between a full language and a bootstrapping
core subset of the same language. ISTM an interesting question what
a bootstrapping core subset for Python would contain.

>put a preexisting language.  The downside is that this unfortunately can
>create debugging problems, but it's often an infinitely better approach
>because it doesn't require consent with any other language designers
>:-).
>
I wonder how many people bother to define a grammar for their ad hoc language,
or use tools like yacc/lex and their descendants.

Regards,
Bengt Richter