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

[Alex Martelli]

metaperl <metaperl at gmail.com> wrote:

Yes, keywords are always reserved.  The one major language that tried to
do otherwise was PL/I, where you could code, e.g.:

  if if = if then then = else else else = if

((of course, '=' was also polimorpically read as either assignment OR
comparison -- I gather that most Basic dialects still do that!-)).

IBM (PL/I's inventor and rabid defender) found out the hard way that
making the parser more complicated, slow and bug-prone in order to allow
such absurd obfuscation was NOT a popular trade-off -- despite IBM's
alleged monopoly power, PL/I is now basically dead while the older,
crankier languages that PL/I wanted to replace, Cobol and particularly
Fortran, are still quite alive (and with reserved words ALWAYS reserved
-- like in C, Python, Java, C#, Haskell, and basically every language
that's even halfway sensible;-).


> Is Python 3k going to fix this sort of thing?

Fortunately not, or we'd all be busy studying Ruby or Boo!-)


Alex