gratuitous new features in 2.0

[Jeff Petkau]

Alex Martelli <alex at magenta.com> wrote in message
news:8o8qi302ls5 at news1.newsguy.com...
> "Grant Griffin" <g2 at seebelow.org> wrote in message
> news:39A78701.720CCEA4 at seebelow.org...
>     [snip]
> > Whatever code breakage caused by "to" can easily be repaired.  (And
> > programmers who use "to" as an identifier deserve what they get. <wink>)
>
> These are the kinds of remarks that might end up letting me
> swallow the ugly "print >>" syntax (I understand it will be
> there whether I swallow it or not, but still it sticks in my throat),
> just because adding a keyword to an existing language is such
> a horrid situation, and yet it keeps getting belittled...!  Winks
> or no winks, this makes my skin crawl.
> ...

Blech. That's *exactly* the logic that produced C++: since they
could never get everyone to go along with new keywords, every
new feature was instead spelled as a random mass of punctuation.
In the long run, new keywords cause no problems at all; overload
too much syntax and you're saying hello to Mr. Ambiguous Grammar.

Since votes don't count, here's mine: preferably a builtin
    println(exploding,cat,file=myfile)

or in second place
    print to myfile exploding,cat

--Jeff (jpet at eskimo.com)