Re: Pass by Reference
- Posted by dcuny Jan 16, 2015
- 1866 views
You are assuming that return 1,2,3 and a,b,c=f() has been accepted while I am assuming it has been rejected.
I'm only assuming they are still being discussed. Is there an official accept/reject committee I should know about? 
I may sound impatient, but I know there are often compelling architectural reasons for not doing things. I'm trying to make sure people understand my motivations (not always easy, since we approach these things from different goals and backgrounds), and writing like this is really not an optimal way to do things.
Plus, the fact there would be two semantically different forms of multiple assignment, that might happen to be implemented identically under the hood, might just be a little too difficult for me.
I'm going to keep on being pedantic about not calling de-sequencing different from multiple assignments.
As you note, it also might be too soon to even start thinking about adding what I'm calling multiple assignments, given that there are likely to still be consequences and issues of de-sequencing that still being discovered.
I've only just grasped the full extent of the call_func() issue and yes that gets horribly messy because it has to drag all this stuff out of the parser and right into the runtime/translator, for very little benefit.
One disadvantage I've come from is that I've come from making two languages (Py and wxBasic) that both had this feature... But it was built into the both languages from the beginning, so there are a lot more hoops that need to be jumped through when you're adding things into an existing language.
And yes, call_func() adds quite a bit of wrinkles to things.
I'm going to give some thought into whether the goals I've been espousing can be accomplished in other ways.
- David
