"as" keyword woes

[MRAB]

Paul Boddie wrote:
> On 9 Des, 14:24, Steven D'Aprano <st... at REMOVE-THIS-
> cybersource.com.au> wrote:
>> That is not what Guido said. What he actually said was:
>>
>> "That's possible with sufficiently powerful parser technology, but
>> that's not how the Python parser (and most parsers, in my experience)
>> treat reserved words."
> 
> I accept that many parsers are operating on predetermined tokens where
> keywords will already have been identified as such, regardless of
> their eventual syntactic context, by the time the parser gets to see
> them. What I wanted to point out was that other approaches are not
> exactly unheard of or particularly rare. Every now and again, the
> language gets extended and new keywords are sought in an excruciating
> process akin to a group writing exercise involving the existing
> keywords. A better parsing framework would alleviate these problems.
> 
> [Car analogy cut]
> 
In some languages (I think Delphi is one of them - it's been a while!) 
some words which would normally be identifiers have a special meaning in 
certain contexts, but the syntax precludes any ambiguity, and not in a 
difficult way. "as" in Python was one of those.

I certainly wouldn't want something like PL/I, where "IF", "THEN" and 
"ELSE" could be identifiers, so you could have code like:

     IF IF = THEN THEN
         THEN = ELSE;
     ELSE
         ELSE = IF;

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PL/I_(programming_language).

>> What Guido is saying is that even if he agreed with the OP he couldn't
>> add that feature. He's not saying that he agrees with the OP. The Zen
>> gives good reasons for believing that even if Python's parser was
>> sufficiently powerful, he'd still consider the feature undesirable.
> 
> Well, I think it's more interesting to explore the boundaries of what
> can be done, to debunk notions that such things aren't being done in
> the mainstream, and to examine whether they could benefit usability,
> than it is to defer to the Zen of Python as some kind of prescriptive,
> near-religious text at every turn.
> 
> Paul
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