What's up with rebinding assignment?

[Alex Martelli]

Des Small wrote:
   ...
>> My question is: is there a chance this will make it into Python?
>> Nobody seems to have noticed it...  Will a PEP help?
> 
> I don't know how the politics works, but Alex Martelli has said that
> the best way to get stuff in is to make an idea visible and hope
> that Someone Important adopts it like unto their own brainchild.

Heh -- I wouldn't recommend anybody to accept my perceptions of
group-politics... it's definitely not my area of expertise;-).


> Naively, if we hang around discussing this ("Operator, Lisp luser!"
> "Keyword, C++ buffoon!") for a bit maybe we'll attract some attention.

I think that we're at the stage at which a PEP or two might help,
and in fact even patches to implement lexical vs := well might.  A
PEP should (as I see things) pick one alternative and discuss the
others (including existing possibilities and alternate changes,
e.g. if the PEP focused on 'lexical' it should mention := as an
alternative and why it's rejected).  Having a patch would let the
speedups, claimed as one important advantage wrt the existing
possibilities, be MEASURED (always more convincing) rather than
GUESSED AT.  Finding places in the standard Python library where
the new construct would help would be a real boon, too.

As it's clearly too late for this to get into Python 2.3, the
time available is quite long -- say 6+ months until the first
likely glimmerings of a future Python 2.4 start appearing.


Alex