"as" keyword woes

[Mensanator]

On Dec 6, 8:16�am, Wolfgang Strobl <ne... at mystrobl.de> wrote:
> Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfr... at ix.netcom.com>:
>
> >On 05 Dec 2008 05:21:25 GMT, Steven D'Aprano
> ><st... at REMOVE-THIS-cybersource.com.au> declaimed the following in
> >comp.lang.python:
>
> >> On Thu, 04 Dec 2008 08:44:19 -0800, Matimus wrote:
>
> >> > The point was that there
> >> > is that new releases don't _break_ anything.
>
> >> But that's clearly not true, because the OP is pointing out that the new
> >> release from 2.5 to 2.6 *does* break his code.
>
> > � �One now has to ask what "break" really meant... For this example,
> >the change did not break Python SYNTAX -- just a complaint about using
> >what is now a reserved word as an object name.
>
> Of course it does:
>
> C:\Python26>python
> Python 2.6 (r26:66721, Oct �2 2008, 11:35:03) [MSC v.1500 32 bit
> (Intel)] on win 32
> Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.>>> as=2
>
> � File "<stdin>", line 1
> � � as=2
> � � �^
> SyntaxError: invalid syntax

I disagree. "Broken" is something you can't work
around. In this case, simply saying as_=2 works fine.

A better example of broken was when the gmpy module
wouldn't solve a certain linear congruence problem
because the problem was not invertible. But
mathematically, solving a linear congruence does
NOT depend on the problem being invertible. It was
the ALGORITHM that depended on the problem being
invertible and there was nothing the user could do
to make the algorithm behave properly. The algorithm
had to be altered to fix the special case of a
solvable linear congruence not being invertible.

>
>
>
> Making a former syntactically valid �two letter name a reserved word in
> 2.6 was a mistake, IMHO.

I think you're in the minority there.

> What's next? What about making i,j,k, x and y
> reserved words in 2.7? =:-/

Yeah, right. That'll happen. You ought to be more
concerned about real problems.

>
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