map/filter/reduce/lambda opinions and background unscientific mini-survey

[Tom Anderson]

On Wed, 5 Jul 2005, George Sakkis wrote:

> "Steven D'Aprano" <steve at REMOVETHIScyber.com.au> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 05 Jul 2005 09:46:41 -0500, Terry Hancock wrote:
> [snip]
>
>> Def would be short for ... defend? defile? defer? defame? default? deflect?
>>
>> There's always *something* to learn. Why def instead of define? Because 
>> "easy to write" beats "instantly obvious to a beginner", if the word is 
>> used all the time and is easy to memorize.
>
> Still it's hard to explain why four specific python keywords - def,
> del, exec and elif - were chosen to be abbreviated, while all the rest
> are full words (http://docs.python.org/ref/keywords.html). "Ease of
> typing" is a joke for an excuse;

For exec and probably del, yes, but def and elif are two of the most 
frequently used keywords in the language, so i think it's reasonable to 
keep them short.

> So, who would object the full-word versions for python 3K ?
>
> def -> define

I'd keep this short - it's one of the most commonly-used keywords. It's 
particularly commonly used if you break your programs down into lots of 
little functions; since this is, IMHO, something we want to encourage 
people to do, we should strive to minimise boilerplate.

> del -> delete

How about just getting rid of del? Removal from collections could be done 
with a method call, and i'm not convinced that deleting variables is 
something we really need to be able to do (most other languages manage 
without it).

> exec -> execute

This should be a function somewhere, maybe a builtin, maybe not - it 
absolutely should not be a keyword. What that function should be called, i 
don't know!

> elif -> else if

I'm not sure about splitting it into two words; there's currently a very 
simple relationship between flow control keywords, meanings, and blocks of 
code, which would be broken if we moved to using "else if". I don't know 
that this relationship is actually important, though.

tom

-- 
Don't believe his lies.