
On Wed, 2003-05-07 at 05:16, Peter Verveer wrote:
I am not sure if this is a bug, or intended behaviour, but the possibilty to compare an array type object to 'Any' would be very useful for me.
'Any' grew up from the C-API, rather than down from the Python design, so it's not very well thought out. Right now, it is a placeholder used to mark arrays with undefined types and to indicate "no type constraint" in C API calls. In normal contexts, you can't make an array of type 'Any'. I think there are two reasonable behaviors for comparisons with 'Any', both used in C. The first behavior is literal comparison; here comparison to Any would generally return "not equal". The second behavior is wild-card matching; here, comparison to Any would generally return "equal". Which makes sense to you? How do you want to use this?
I use 'Any' right now in C functions to indicate 'no type constraint'. You could use both literal comparison and wild-card matching behaviour for that, if you want to do this in Python, I think. But maybe one should not do such a thing in Python by comparison to 'Any' at all.
Literal comparison is what I generally expect from Python objects, so anything else may just be confusing (at least to me). However, the name 'Any' does suggest the wild-card matching behaviour.
Is there specific reason why you exposed 'Any' in python?
Initially it was not exposed. As the API type functions evolved, it made Any less of a special case to expose it.
Maybe it would be better not to expose such a type object since it seems to be a 'special case'. I am starting to think that my use for it at the Python level is not appropiate. For instance, I could easily use 'None' instead, and I think I will do that in the future.
Yes. That's probably what I should have done in C as well: tNone rather than tAny.
You mentioned that 'Any' is really a C-API thing. Unless somebody has a good use for it I would now actually say that it maybe should not be exposed at the Python API level at all...
I agree with this. It might be as simple as renaming it to _Any in Python, but I still hesitate to change this until I have a little more time to think about it. Too often, things go from "bad" to "not so good"... Thanks for the input, Todd