Turn procedure calls into statements? (Re: Code block literals)

[Greg Ewing (using news.cis.dfn.de)]

Dave Benjamin wrote:
> Here's my non-PEP for such a feature:
> 
> return { |x, y|
>     print x
>     print y
> }

This is scary! Some years ago I devised a language called "P" that
was translated into Postscript. Its parameterised code blocks looked
EXACTLY like that!

I wouldn't like to see this in Python, though -- it doesn't quite
look Pythonic enough, somehow.

Maybe instead of trying to find a way of shoehorning a compound
statement into an expression, we should be trying to find a way
of writing a procedure call, which would normally be an expression,
as a statement... maybe something like

   with_directory "/foo/blarg" do:
     print os.listdir(".")

which would be equivalent to

   def _somefunc():
     print os.listdir(".")
   with_directory("/foo/blarg", do = _somefunc)

-- 
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept,
University of Canterbury,	
Christchurch, New Zealand
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg