Confused about pep 318

[Peter Hansen]

Anthony Baxter wrote:

> On Thu, 05 Aug 2004 13:29:29 -0400, Peter Hansen <peter at engcorp.com> wrote:
> 
>>I'll make another donation to PSF if the final decorator syntax
>>does not Perlishly use arbitrary punctuation as the @ syntax does.
> 
> FFS. What exactly is "Perlish" about @? It's an unused symbol. That's all.
> It's hardly arbitrary - Java, for instance, already uses @ for the same thing.

And Java chose it based on what precedent?  Basing a choice on
someone else's arbitrary choice makes something only ever so
slightly less arbitrary.

Python doesn't need to select syntax from other languages.  Python
leads, it doesn't follow.  Until now.  :-(

-Peter