Are Python's reserved words reserved in places they dont need to be?

[Alex Martelli]

Steve Holden <steve at holdenweb.com> wrote:

> Otherwise you could try and fix the error, like the PL/1 F-level 
> compiler used to. This would usually work when all that was wrong was a
> missing semicolon, but it frequently went completely berserk in other

Ah, yeah, I forgot that particularly endearing aspect of PL/I (to go
with the language having no keywords) -- many compilers bent over
backwards to double-guess what you meant, resulting in deep
misunderstandings by many programmers about what the language was
SUPPOSED to be, mysterious error messages and (worse!) program
misbehavior, etc etc -- all, of course, at the price of making the
compilers ever more intricate, bug-prone, extremely heavy in resource
cosumption, slow, and laughably bad at optimization (when compared to
compilers of the same era for sensibly SIMPLE languages, such as
Fortran).

Thanks for reviving the memories: it makes me SO ineffably glad that
nowadays I'm using a language which, among its guiding principles, has
"in the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess"!!!-)


Alex