Re: [Pyobjc-dev] Objective-P?

[Anders H. <bo...@ki...>]

On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 10:59 AM, Ronald Oussoren <ron...@ma...>wrote:

>
> On 12 Nov, 2009, at 0:01, Anders Hovmöller wrote:
>
> [ .... ]
>
>
> Find attached the source for the custom importer.
>
>
> While this is a nice trick I'd be much more interested in a syntax-change
> that at least has a chance of getting accepted into the Python core.   Your
> syntax for calling a method is ambiguous, at least for the parser using in
> CPython and possibly in general:
>
>     10 <foo + bar> baz
>
> Python's parser needs to know if the '<' token is the start of a method
> call or a comparison operator (and so do humans, it's far from clear what's
> going on here when I look at the code).
>

Yea, I know. I just chose <> instead of [] to finish my quick and dirty
prototype in the two hours I had alloted :P As for trying to get something
that can be accepted into Python proper, I think that's a dead end. Python
already has a syntax for named parameters. I think this calls for a domain
specific extension, not something you'd necessarily want to push up to
CPython.


>
>
I've been thinking about syntax enhancements during the summer, the best I
> could think of was the introduction of a new operator:
>
>     class MyObject (NSObject):
>          def $[setValue: value]:
> pass
>
>    $[myObject setValue:42]
>
> In this code '$[' would be a new operator, which should be unambigous
> w.r.t. existing code. Better yet, one could use a simular trick for
> anonymous functions:
>
> Hmm, yea that's probably a nicer way of doing it. Changing from < and > to
$[ and ] should be a rather trivial change in the hack I wrote.

Best regards,
Anders