Pythonification of the asterisk-based collection packing/unpacking syntax

[Eelco]

On Jan 3, 3:38 am, alex23 <wuwe... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Dec 27 2011, 8:01 pm, Eelco <hoogendoorn.ee... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > But I consider it a reasonable change for a
> > 'python 4', or whatever the next major version change will be called.
>
> You do realise there were 8 years between 2 & 3? You might be waiting
> for quite some time.

Yes, I realize this discussion is quite theoretical in nature. Some of
the more 'emotionally engaged' participants might do well to keep that
in mind as well.

> Conversely, you could pitch in behind Rick Johnson's Python 4000 fork,
> I sure it's progressing nicely given how long Rick has been talking it
> up.

Would you be so kind as to leave your personal feuds at the door?

> > Writing a code-conversion tool to convert from *args to args::tuple
> > would be quite easy indeed.
>
> You might want to ask people maintaining libraries in both 2.x & 3.x
> via 2to3 just how well that's working out for them. If the impact of
> changes was trivially obvious, the programming landscape would look
> very different indeed.

Of course if a conversion tool falters on even a single construct,
automated conversion is not going to be reliable, and thats going to
be a pain. But whatever python 4 will be like, its not going to be
backwards compatible by definition; and at least I dont think this
proposed change will contribute to the trouble of conversion between
the two. It is really quite a superficial syntax tweak.