Favorite non-python language trick?

Sergei Organov osv at javad.ru
Fri Jun 24 11:09:05 EDT 2005


Steven D'Aprano <steve at REMOVETHIScyber.com.au> writes:

> On Fri, 24 Jun 2005 00:55:38 -0600, Joseph Garvin wrote:
> 
> > I'm curious -- what is everyone's favorite trick from a non-python 
> > language? And -- why isn't it in Python?
> 
> Long ago, I used to dabble in Forth. You could say, the entire Forth
> language was a trick :-) It was interesting to be able to define your own
> compiler commands, loop constructs and so forth.
> 
> One of the things I liked in Pascal was the "with" keyword. You could
> write something like this:
> 
> with colour do begin
> red := 0; blue := 255; green := 0;
> end;
> 
> instead of:
> 
> colour.red := 0; colour.blue := 255; colour.green := 0;
> 
> Okay, so maybe it is more of a feature than a trick, but I miss it and it
> would be nice to have in Python.

... that quickly becomes quite messy:

with A do begin
  .....
  with B do begin
    .....
    with C do begin
      x := y;
    end;
  end;
end;

... and now you need to check the declarations of C, B, and A to
actually see what is assigned to what.

Worse yet, adding field 'x' to 'C' will (silently) break the code :(

I don't think it would be that nice to have it in Python.

-- 
Sergei.



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