Why aren't colons optional?
Alex Martelli
aleax at aleax.it
Sun Jan 20 16:54:56 EST 2002
Neil Hodgson wrote:
> Alex Martelli:
>
>> The use of {} for dictionary-displays is indeed a tiny anomaly (but I
>> have no better idea for the general case; for the reasonably common case
>> where keys are constant identifiers, of course,
>
> Is ['a':1, 'b':2, 'c':3] not feasible? It looks easy to disambiguate
> from
> [1, 2, 3] lists although it would introduce a new 'mixing list and
> dictionary notation' error for [1, 'a':1]. Doesn't look like it would be
> ambiguous with slicing as the contexts are different.
Not technically ambiguous for the parser, perhaps, as long as a
stand-alone 1:3 or [1:3] is not accepted as meaning a range iterator (I
recall such a PEP being rejected once, but hope dies slowly:-). But
having the meaning of [1:3] so highly context-dependent does not
appeal all that much to me (although in that it wouldn't differ from
present [7] -- either singleton list or indexing operation).
Alex
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