Comment by peterkelly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by peterkelly | Hacker News Reader

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> I seriously cannot think of anything I could do to exceed Python.

Just off the top of my head:

- Pattern matching

- Multi-line lambdas

- Proper variable capture in lambdas and inner functions (as was fixed with the 'let' keyword vs 'var' in recent versions of JavaScript)

- Support for cyclic imports (a bad pattern in general but necessary in some cases)

- A well-defined C API for extensions that doesn't get them too entangled in the internals of CPython. This would make it possible for other implementations to reach the level of library support that CPython enjoys.

Pattern matching is in PEP 635, created Sep 12, 2020.

Multi-line lambdas can be sort of obtained in Python by defining a progn function:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19933223

I would say proper variable scoping in general. It would be awesome to have let variables in python!

Variables are scoped just fine from my point of view. What do you mean by proper?

I meant to say block scoped. Variables in python have function or global scope but no global scope. E.g. you can say

   for x in ...:

and then use x outside of the loop.

I have no idea why you would want to declare an x in the loop, and then use it outside the loop. There are better ways of doing things.

The fact that you can do such a thing in JavaScript is exactly why JavaScript is such a mess of a language with its globally-declared and hoisted variables.

That sort of practice has never made sense, and is not a language design that Python should follow.

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