Why is there no natural syntax for accessing attributes with names not being valid identifiers?

[Antoon Pardon]

Op 04-12-13 13:01, rusi schreef:
> On Wednesday, December 4, 2013 3:59:06 PM UTC+5:30, Antoon Pardon wrote:
>> Op 04-12-13 11:09, rusi schreef:
>>> I used the spaces case to indicate the limit of chaos. 
>>> Other characters (that
>>> already have uses) are just as problematic.
>>
>> I don't agree with the latter. As it is now python can make the
>> distinction between
>>
>> from A import B    and     fromAimportB.
>>
>> I see no a priori reason why this should be limited to letters. A
>> language designer might choose to allow a bigger set of characters
>> in identifiers like '-', '+' and others. In that case a-b would be
>> an identifier and a - b would be the operation. Just as in python
>> fromAimportB is an identifier and from A import B is an import
>> statement.
> 
> Im not sure what you are saying.
> Sure a language designer can design a language differently from python.
> I mentioned lisp. Cobol is another behaving exactly as you describe.
> 
> My point is that when you do (something like) that, you will need to change the
> lexical and grammatical structure of the language.  And this will make 
> for rather far-reaching changes ALL OVER the language not just in what-follows-dot.

No you don't need to change the lexical and grammatical structure of
the language. Changing the characters allowed in identifiers, is not a
change in lexical structure. The only difference in lexical structuring
would be that '-', '>=' and other similars symbols would have to be
treated like keyword like 'from', 'as' etc instead of being recognizable
by just being present.

And the grammatical structure of the language wouldn't change at all.
Sure a-b would now be an identifier and not an operation but that is
of no concern for the parser.

People would have to be careful to insert spaces around operators
and that might make the language somewhat error prone but that doesn't
mean the syntactical structure is different.

-- 
Antoon Pardon