Interesting talk on Python vs. Ruby and how he would like Python to have just a bit more syntactic flexibility.

[Steve Howell]

On Feb 18, 9:52 pm, Gregory Ewing <greg.ew... at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
> Steve Howell wrote:
> > Python may not support the broadest notion of anonymous functions, but
> > it definitely has anonymous blocks.  You can write this in Python:
>
> >     for i in range(10):
> >         print i
> >         print i * i
> >         print i * i * i
>
> There's a clear difference between this and a Ruby block,
> however. A "block" in Ruby is implemented by passing a
> callable object to a method. There is no callable object
> corresponding to the body of a for-loop in Python.
>
> The important thing about Ruby blocks is not that they're
> anonymous, but that they're concrete objects that can
> be manipulated.
>

Agreed.

> The Ruby approach has the advantage of making it possible
> to implement user-defined control structures without
> requiring a macro facility. You can't do that in Python.
>
> However, there's something that Python's iterator protocol
> makes possible that you can't do with a block-passing
> approach. You can have multiple iterators active at once,
> and pull values from them as an when required in the
> calling code. Ruby's version of the iterator protocol
> can't handle that, because once an iterator is started
> it retains control until it's finished.
>

Is this still true or Ruby today?

http://pragdave.blogs.pragprog.com/pragdave/2007/12/pipelines-using.html

> Also, most people who advocate adding some form of
> block-passing facility to Python don't seem to have
> thought through what would happen if the block contains
> any break, continue, return or yield statements.
>

For sure.  It's certainly not clear to me how Ruby handles all those
cases, although I am still quite new to Ruby, so it's possible that I
just haven't stumbled upon the best explanations yet.

> This issue was looked into in some detail back when there
> was consideration of implementing the with-statement
> by passing the body as a function. Getting these
> statements to behave intuitively inside the body
> turned out to be a very thorny problem -- thorny enough
> to cause the block-passing idea to be abandoned in
> favour of the current implementation.
>

I found these links in the archive...were these part of the discussion
you were referring to?

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-April/052907.html

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-April/053055.html

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-April/053123.html