Quoth Greg Stein, on 16 December 1998:
I believe the public interface will/should always be a set of names and values. Even if we do a hack in lieu of native Python support, we should just set globals for use by clients.
There may be functions in there, too, for compiler invocation and stuff (as John recommends). I'm not clear on whether that needs to be in sysconfig.py or part of the distutils package (forgot the pkg name).
I agree: sysconfig.py should be a flat list of globals. A brain-dump of Python's configuration info, as it were. This implies that any functions/methods (eg. for invoking the compiler) belong in some distutils module. After all, this is the 'distutils' project; as much code as possible should go in the 'distutils' package. sysconfig should just be a flat braindump.
All right, you Perl hacker. We'll have none of this here! Python doesn't have "hashes" ... it has dictionaries! Also, it is always possible to view module globals as a dictionary (with vars(sysconfig)), so there isn't a need for another level containing a dictionary.
Go home Perl hacker!
My list of gripes with Python is pretty small, but I think the main one is that the word "Dictionary" is just too long to type. And when you write as many comments as I do, that matters... ;-) Just another /^P\w+/ hacker... Greg PS. Oops, I just realized that regex also lets Pascal in, and PL1 (of course it should be written "PL/1" [or is it "PL/I"?]), and Prolog... hmmm... back to the drawing board... -- Greg Ward - software developer gward@cnri.reston.va.us Corporation for National Research Initiatives 1895 Preston White Drive voice: +1-703-620-8990 x287 Reston, Virginia, USA 20191-5434 fax: +1-703-620-0913