David> It also has the disadvantage of adding a new syntactical
David> construct to the language does it not (which seems like more pain
David> than a couple of keywords)? I don't recall any other place in
David> the language that uses [] as a way to specify a variable (oops,
David> excepting list comprehensions sort of, and that's not quite the
David> same thing IMO), especially in that position in a statement?
Adding new syntactic sugar is less problem than adding keywords for two
reasons:
* old code may have used the new keyword as a variable (because it
wasn't a keyword)
* old code won't have used the new syntactic sugar (because it wasn't
proper syntax)
Combined, it means there is a higher probability that old code will continue
to run with a new bit of syntax than with a new keyword.
You can think of [mod1, mod2, ...] as precisely a list of modifiers to
normal functions, so it is very much like existing list construction syntax
in that regard. Also "[...]" often means "optional" in may grammar
specifications or documentation, so there's an added hint as to the meaning.
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