What do you want in a new web framework?

[Kay Schluehr]

Cliff Wells wrote:

> My single wishlist item (which will probably never happen) is actually
> the *removal* of a single "feature": the distinction between statements
> and expressions.  Forget list comprehensions, ternary operators, etc.
> You get them with no additional syntax in expression-based languages.  I
> played with Logix a bit (but sadly the project appears dead) and the
> expression-based Python syntax it provides gives me goose-bumps.

Ironically I would prefer to turn Logix block expressions of the kind

var = expression:
   SUITE

into statements to avoid deep and awkward nestings: passing the
side-effect created by SUITE to var but preserving the distinction
between expressions and block statements nevertheless. I'm not yet sure
if the Python 2.5 with-stmt cannot be used for exactly this purpose?

Note that I'm not completely against blurring the distinction between
expressions and statements in Python. The Python grammar itself
contains a basic distinction between statements namely simple_stmt and
compound_stmt nodes.

Simple statements are defined by:

simple_stmt: small_stmt ( ";" small_stmt)* [";"] NEWLINE

where small_stmt nodes are nodes for assert, print, raise, return,
assignment etc.

It took me an evening using EasyExtend to define an enhanced lambda
that enables expressions like:

lambda lst: s = sum(lst); return float(s)/len(lst)

or 

lambda x: print x; x+1

which are other Logix examples.