Laura Creighton wrote:

I would like some :-)

Well, it's really hard to give advice. I have my opinions, which you know are sometimes quite different from other's, and the list seems to be quite quiet on the weekend... There are a couple of open issues when looking into builtins. One of these is btw., that we didn't define a module object, yet, which we really need since builtins is a module. Then, by looking at some simple function in builtinmodule, even more questions are raised: static PyObject * builtin_isinstance(PyObject *self, PyObject *args) { PyObject *inst; PyObject *cls; int retval; if (!PyArg_ParseTuple(args, "OO:isinstance", &inst, &cls)) return NULL; retval = PyObject_IsInstance(inst, cls); if (retval < 0) return NULL; return PyInt_FromLong(retval); } What do we have here? First of all, there is the Python calling convention, that every function call has a self argument, may this be used or not. Builtins doesn't use it at all, so you always can ignore self. But then, what about the arg tuple? I didn't find any definition how this is handled. Well, let me look into the interpreter, there they must have some notation of a function call.............. ...back from there. As far as I can see it, we end up being called like this: w_result = f.space.call(w_function, w_arguments, w_keywords) f.valuestack.push(w_result) (from opcode.py) Now let me dive into objectspace :-) Unfortunately, even the trivial space doesn't run under PythonWin or Boa constructor, so I can't use the debugger. Aha, as it looks right now, we do not distinguish different calling conventions, and we have to deal with something like def builtin_isinstance(*args, **kwds): The problem is then that we don't have PyArg_ParseTuple and friends, yet, and we have not settled down where we can find PyObject_IsInstance implemented. Question: To get things going, should we simply use the given function interfaces from CPython, and code some PyArg_ParseTuple away? Question: Where do we put undefined stuff, when we want to write a module like builtins? Sigh... This seems to be a bit too hard for me, tonight. Maybe someone on the list has an idea how to bootstrap all this stuff? good nite - chris -- Christian Tismer :^) <mailto:tismer@tismer.com> Mission Impossible 5oftware : Have a break! Take a ride on Python's Johannes-Niemeyer-Weg 9a : *Starship* http://starship.python.net/ 14109 Berlin : PGP key -> http://wwwkeys.pgp.net/ work +49 30 89 09 53 34 home +49 30 802 86 56 pager +49 173 24 18 776 PGP 0x57F3BF04 9064 F4E1 D754 C2FF 1619 305B C09C 5A3B 57F3 BF04 whom do you want to sponsor today? http://www.stackless.com/