Re: [Pyobjc-dev] Objective-P?

[Leonardo S. <san...@gm...>]

On Nov 12, 2009, at 8:52 AM, Anders Hovmöller wrote:

> 
> 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.
> 

I always thought of doing this as a different encoding, so you can put your translation on Lib/encodings/ and just do a # _*_ encoding: objective-c on the source files. I know, it is kinda crazy. 

Look at pybraces for how to do it:
http://timhatch.com/projects/pybraces/

--
Leonardo Santagada
santagada at gmail.com