Talk:Python syntax and semantics

Not fit for wikipedia
As much as I love python, I simply don't think this is fit for wikipedia. Speak now or forever hold your peace. This would be great rewritten in someone's blog or the python documentation perhaps, but wikipedia is not meant for software documentation, this is better left up to the project's documentation team or a specific website. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.227.144.76 (talk) 10:05, 9 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I feel better to see at least one noticed the same. This article is advertising or propaganda (as there are plenty of others on Wikipedia, by the way). --Hibou57 (talk) 14:18, 11 September 2014 (UTC)
 * I agree, it's (IMHO) not the highest quality either. Robertwb (talk) 00:47, 23 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Disagreed. Wikipedia is totally meant for software "documentation" -- and everything-else documentation -- when the documentation is notable and discriminate. This article summarizes well, and the subsections are cohesive. The article is neither advertising nor propaganda by any reasonable definition. I agree it could benefit from a more neutral tone in some places, e.g. "another strength of Python...". Bob Stein - VisiBone (talk) 15:54, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
 * I also disagree. If you find this article to be too propagandistic, please help improving it and make it more fact based. PAB-global (talk) 10:29, 1 June 2016 (UTC)
 * I 100% agree. Vast swathes of the article are unsourced, use too much opinionated language, are out of date, and large parts should just be merged with Python_(programming_language). Unless someone really wants to improve it, I'm +1 for deletion. It's not "advertising or propaganda" though. LetterC (talk) 15:36, 18 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Agreed. I find it extraordinary that the language definition is here on Wikipedia and not on python.org. I am not a big fan of the modern style of programming language documentation, where there's no language definition, only a big cookbook of examples that one must learn by osmosis (with no guarrantee that the cookbook has covered everything). Java and C have their flaws, but at least you can be sure that the language is definitely all in one place. 203.13.3.93 (talk) 00:32, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
 * My apologies. The language reference is available at https://docs.python.org . Which, again, means that there's no particular reason for it to be here. 203.13.3.93 (talk) 01:15, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Disagree: Both Java and C have syntax pages. Agree that the Python syntax page could do with some work, but then that could be said about many pages on wikipedia. peterl (talk) 05:11, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
 *  Disagree  : I second what Bob Stein was saying; I don't think "some other website should be documenting this" is a reason on its own to exclude this, since documenting human knowledge is kinda the entire point of Wikipedia? Other issues with the core content policies should be straightforward to handle, since it's not an opinion-based topic. Why are we talking about deletion instead of just fixing the described problems? For instance, it could probably benefit from more diverse references, but this is still fixable.-- Macks2008 (talk) 21:14, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

This article has neither syntax nor semantics, is just useless Blah Blah Blah!
I was looking for the BNF syntax or an extended BNF if, as seems, Python has bi-dimensional syntax. I also expected a formal or at least a precise description of Python semantics.

This article is just verbose. Typical of enthusiast aficionados.
 * agreed. The "design and philosophy" section is sheer fluff. 203.13.3.90 (talk) 00:37, 5 August 2021 (UTC)

I know that a formal article intimidate those who learned to write programs in Python with no formal education in computing, have no idea of how the syntax of a language is, and how, according to its semantics, is used to build a compiler. So the new article should be aficionado-friendly, but precise, please.

If everybody agree, lets mark this article to be complete rewritten. At least as a first stage with a formal syntax, and later with a precise semantics.

I don't know Python, otherwise I would help.


 * We'd love to assist, but apparently we're all too stupid to be worthy of you.
 * BNF? What is this, the 1970s? I know Python is old, but even Python's not that old. Also (and because I am old), I've never seen a useful language where either BNF was able to describe it, or the extended BNF which was being used was at all consistent with anyone else's extended BNF.
 * If you really want to know, the place to start looking is here, as already referenced in the article. But BNF is not that place. Andy Dingley (talk) 02:54, 13 August 2018 (UTC)


 * I believe you're looking for https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Grammar/python.gram . This was recently overhauled. On Python 3.8 the grammar was specified in https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/3.8/Grammar/Grammar Akeosnhaoe (talk) 08:34, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

This article is still outdated
This article needs to be updated: it doesn't describe some of the major features of Python that were introduced in recent years, such as structural pattern matching. Jarble (talk) 18:27, 31 August 2021 (UTC)


 * It's not quite fair to say the article is "outdated", yet give an example of a feature that is not yet in the most recent version of Python (3.9.7). Noting Structural Pattern Matching is due in 3.10, due next month. Do you have any examples where the article is outdated? peterl (talk) 03:18, 1 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Not describing something that hasn't been released yet doesn't make this article "outdated". Akeosnhaoe (talk) 03:20, 1 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Even when Python 3.10 is out, not describing this one construct makes this article incomplete, not outdated. None of the rest of the information in it is old (i.e. outdated) just because it doesn't mention one aspect of Python. You heard that Python is getting a new feature and you're excited about it, I get it. But if you've set an alarm for midnight 2021-10-04 to add that Outdated template, you should cancel it or keep it but then add a small section explaining the syntax yourself. Akeosnhaoe (talk) 16:07, 15 September 2021 (UTC)