[Python-ideas] proposal to add rowexpr as a keyword

[Steve Howell]

--- Josiah Carlson <jcarlson at uci.edu> wrote:

> Technically speaking, lambda is sufficient for
> turing completeness [...]

...as is Perl, or machine code, to pick sort of
opposite ends of the spectrum :)

> Is that reduction worthwhile?  I personally don't
> think so, but my list
> comprehensions tend to have fairly minimal
> predicates.  One thing to
> take into consideration is that Guido has previously
> shot down 'order by'
> syntax in list comprehensions and generator
> expressions because he
> didn't think that they were Pythonic (I seem to
> remember 'ugly' and
> 'worthless', but maybe that was my response to
> them).
> 

:)

I am only expressing my own aesthetics, and I would
certainly defer to Guido on most matters aesthetic,
since he's written an aesthetically beautiful
language.

But having said that, I don't want my proposal
automatically lumped in with every proposal that Guido
has found unaesthetic, or rejected, and I believe he
has even been known to change his mind from time to
time.

For all the real-world warts of SQL, I think SQL is a
very aesthetically pleasing way to express
transformations of relational data structures, and
Python contains relational data structures, and
therefore I think Python can benefit from using SQL as
just one way of expressing relational transformations
(and I'm still a little bit TIMTOWTDI from my Perl
days, I fully admit).

I fully concede all the obvious objections--more
syntax, more ways to do it, difficulty of implementing
it within the VM, ability of people to already
manipulate relational data structures more cleanly
than me in Python, etc.

I'm not asking for this in Fall 2007, BTW, I'm
expressing this as a vision for a bigger, better
Python, maybe year 2010, even though smaller is
usually better.  And syntactically, I am only
extending the language by one keyword, or one new way
of triple-quoting. 

For my own use, native SQL would benefit the clarity
of my (already working, but sometimes ugly) code more
than some other additions proposed in Py3k, but YMMV.



  



 
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