True, False, None (was re. Pruss's manifesto)

[Thomas Bellman]

Alex Martelli <aleax at aleax.it> wrote:

> True, False and None may well become keywords in the future, because that
> might make things "even finer" in some respects.  E.g., right now,
>     while True:
>         ...
> has to look-up 'True' at EACH step just in case the ... code rebinds
> that name.  This _is_ a bit silly, when there is no real use-case for
> "letting True be re-bound".  Nothing major, but...:

That's a silly reason to make them keywords.  A much better way
to achieve the same goal would be to make the optimizer recognize
that True isn't re-bound within the loop.  Making the optimizer
better would improve the performance of much more code than just
'while True' loops.


-- 
Thomas Bellman,   Lysator Computer Club,   Linköping University,  Sweden
"You cannot achieve the impossible without   !  bellman @ lysator.liu.se
 attempting the absurd."                     !  Make Love -- Nicht Wahr!