Syntax suggestion.

[Alex Martelli]

samir <samirbenabid at linuxmail.org> wrote:

> > But how would you discern between a function reference and a function
> > call?
> 
> That would be a problem with two solutions:
> 1- If the function doesn't have any parameters, it will be called with
> the empty parentheses (just like usual!);
> 2- to indicate that this is a function call, we would be adding a $ at
> the end of the statement.

What a mess it would be to disambiguate statements such as

x = foo bar baz bat

is it x = (foo, bar, baz, bat)
or x = foo(bar, baz, bat)
or x = foo(bar(baz), bat)
or x = foo(bar, baz(bat))
or x = foo(bar(baz, bat))
or ... [even ignoring the possibility that one or more of these might be
functions callable without arguments...!!!]...

iPython has some heuristics that may be reasonable for the commandline
(and are, in any case, at least simple), but in practice I find that I
go back to using the good old interactive Python interpreter rather than
putting up with even those simple heuristics.


Alex