A Welcome Syntax

A Welcome Syntax

We're kinda stuck here, because we don't have the resources to support our own bindings to the vendor-supplied hardware libraries. The vendor supports C89 using callback hell, or async Python; we've asked them to support a "simple" interface using non-async Python (which is plenty for our use case), but they don't want to, citing a belief that "big" customers won't take them seriously if they offer a simple interface as well as a complicated one.

And it's simpler for us to keep retraining the hardware people on Python every 6 months than to maintain a wrapper around the (constantly changing) vendor libraries to make it easy for them. The annoyance is that this is purely syntactical - they see await foo() as two separate things, when they should see it as one for their purposes, and they get confused because in their mental model of "how this works", keyword function() implies returning from this function to the caller, (as return and yield do), and that's not what they want to do here. Changing it to "look" like a function call (even though it isn't) would fit their mental model, since that's what they want to do - run the thing until it returns an answer.

$ cat t.py
import asyncio

async def x():
    print('A')
    await asyncio.sleep(1)
    print('B')
    await(asyncio.sleep(1))
    print('C')

asyncio.run(x())

$ python3 t.py
A
B
C