[Python-ideas] Verbatim names (allowing keywords as names)

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Thu, May 17, 2018 at 06:03:32PM +1200, Greg Ewing wrote:
> Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> >Let's say you're reading from a CSV file, creating an object from each 
> >row, and processing it:
> 
> Okay, I can see it could be useful for situations like that.
> 
> But this is still a completely different use case from the
> one that started this discussion, which was making it less
> painful to add new keywords to the language. The backslash
> idea doesn't help at all with that.

Doesn't help *at all*?

Sure it does.

It's Python 3.8, and I learn that in 4.0 "spam" is going to become a 
keyword. I simply take my code and change all the references spam to 
\spam, and I've future-proofed the code for 4.0 while still keeping 
compatibility with 3.8 and 3.9.

(But not 3.7 of course. But we can't have everything.)

If my code is a library which others will use, the benefit is even 
bigger. (For a purely internal project, I could just replace spam with 
spam_ and be done with it.) But for a library, I already have public 
documentation saying that my API is the function spam(), and I don't 
want to have to change the public API. As far as my library's users are 
concerned, nothing has changed.



-- 
Steve