pretending the "not" operator is a function behaves surprisingly

[hhm]

BPO	11381
Nosy	@birkenfeld, @rhettinger

^{Note: these values reflect the state of the issue at the time it was migrated and might not reflect the current state.}

Show more details

GitHub fields:

assignee = None
closed_at = <Date 2011-03-03.07:20:45.888>
created_at = <Date 2011-03-03.05:44:40.307>
labels = ['type-bug']
title = 'pretending the "not" operator is a function behaves surprisingly'
updated_at = <Date 2011-03-03.17:10:11.202>
user = 'https://bugs.python.org/hhm'

bugs.python.org fields:

activity = <Date 2011-03-03.17:10:11.202>
actor = 'rhettinger'
assignee = 'none'
closed = True
closed_date = <Date 2011-03-03.07:20:45.888>
closer = 'georg.brandl'
components = []
creation = <Date 2011-03-03.05:44:40.307>
creator = 'hhm'
dependencies = []
files = []
hgrepos = []
issue_num = 11381
keywords = []
message_count = 3.0
messages = ['129933', '129935', '129983']
nosy_count = 3.0
nosy_names = ['georg.brandl', 'rhettinger', 'hhm']
pr_nums = []
priority = 'normal'
resolution = 'rejected'
stage = None
status = 'closed'
superseder = None
type = 'behavior'
url = 'https://bugs.python.org/issue11381'
versions = ['Python 2.6']

[hhm]

I'm not sure if this is a bug per se, since I don't think pretending operators are callable is in the docs, but:

pretending an operator (at least the "not" operator) is callable, like so:
not(True)

can be surprising:
>>> (not 1) == 9
False

>>> not(1) == 9
True

Now, I know this is valid because Python is very lenient about whitespace (and the parenthenses are really just "eval '1' first") , but, this is still confusing behavior to someone who does not know about that.

I think the same problem may be possible in the case of statements.

A possible solution is to make sure there is at least some white-space between "alphabetical" operators and statements.

[birkenfeld]

I don't think this is wise, or necessary.

I'm not sure why you would treat an operator as callable; the tutorial hopefully doesn't tell you such things.

[rhettinger]

I concur with Georg.