Lennart Regebro wrote:
On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 08:03, Cameron Simpson <cs@zip.com.au> wrote:
clock = get_clock(MONOTONIC|HIRES) or get_clock(MONOTONIC)
If the symbol names are not the horribleness, can you qualify what API you would like more?
Well, get_clock(monotonic=True, highres=True) would be a vast improvement over get_clock(MONOTONIC|HIRES). I also think it should raise an error if not found. The clarity and easy of use of the API is much more important than how much you can do in one line.
That's a matter of opinion. I'm not particularly fond of this get_clock idea, but of the two examples given, I much prefer the first of these: get_clock(MONOTONIC|HIRES) get_clock(monotonic=True, highres=True) and not just because it is shorter. The API is crying out for enum arguments, not a series of named flags. But frankly I think this get_clock API sucks. At some earlier part of this thread, somebody listed three or four potential characteristics of clocks. If we offer these as parameters to get_clock(), that means there's eight or sixteen different clocks that the user can potentially ask for. Do we really offer sixteen different clocks? Or even eight? I doubt it -- there's probably only two or three. So the majority of potential clocks don't exist. With get_clock, discoverability is hurt. How does the caller know what clocks are available? How can she look for documentation for them? A simple, obvious, discoverable API is best. If we offer three clocks, we have three named functions. If some of these clocks aren't available on some platform, and we can't emulate them, then simply don't have that named function available on that platform. That's easy to discover: trying to use that clock will give a NameError or AttributeError, and the caller can then fall back on an alternative, or fail, whichever is appropriate. -- Steven