> [Guido]: > > David Scherer proposed to spell this pragma as a "magical import" > > (http://www.python.org/pipermail/idle-dev/2000-April/000138.html). [Peter Funk] > Huh? AFAIR David Scherer and Bruce Sherwood used the 'global'-statement > at module level as a backward compatible method to introduce module level > pragmas. (http://www.python.org/pipermail/idle-dev/2000-April/000140.html) > I still like David Scherers proposal very much. Oops, you're right. That URL mentions "global olddivision". The "import floatdivision" proposal came from a more recent private mail from Bruce Sherwood. I maintain that neither seems the right way to spell "directive". I think "import" is slightly better if the import is supposed to enable a feature that is not supported by previous versions, because the import will cause a clear failure on systems that don't have the new feature (rather than silently giving wrong results sometimes). > BTW: I think the "symbol" '//' is incredible ugly and starting with > IBMs JCL years ago all languages I encountered, that used this symbol > for something, did suck in some way or another. I would appreaciate > very much, if it could be avoided alltogether to add a symbol '//' > to Python. '//' will look like a comment delimiter to most people today. Good point. I've just used // as a placeholder for a new way to spell integer division. > Using a new keyword like 'div' in the tradition of languages like > Modula-2 looks far more attractive to me. That's a possibility too. It's a new keyword though, which has a much higher threshold for acceptance than a new two-character operator symbol. We could spell it as a built-in function: div(a, b), (analogous to divmod(a, b)) but that's not very user-friendly either. Keep looking... --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
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