I can only really think of one instance where I've used this, and it was to work around an outright bug in the library (which was unmaintained, and I was using out of a certain amount of desperation).
FWIW, most of the complaints around private in my post would actually be solved just by having a separate namespace for "private," even if there was a back door. I'd be pretty willing to forgive that.
> Multi-line lambdas would certainly be nice, but most of it can be handled with a scope-level function.
In the absence of the with statement can you really imagine yourself writing this all the time:
def _with_body(f):
print(f)
print("I am a teapot")
with(open("foo.txt"), _with_body)
Strikes me as pretty ugly, despite not actually adding much code.
> As for syntax, no need to use Ruby's syntax, just incorporate parenthesis (a well established continuation construct within Python):
Yeah, that's a bit nicer.
> As for the example error - there is a typo. Of course it's going to throw a traceback. The error message is even more explicit than I expected, frankly. It pointed out the missing function name, which would make the typo rather easy to find.
Yeah, that was kinda my point; I was comparing this to what happens if you try to "take duck typing to heart", where you don't get the error until you try to call request. The earlier you find out about mistakes the better.