[Martin]
"Mark Hammond" <mhammond@skippinet.com.au> writes:
I am sure I am missing something, but I can't see it. I am ready to feel foolish <wink>. It would certainly be easier for me to work on such a strategy than to convert all my extensions.
It is a violation of the principle
Errors should never pass silently. Unless explicitly silenced.
Ah-ha - elementary now you point it out <wink>
If you have a function
my_account.add_amount_of_money(0x80000000L)
and the implementation is a C function with an "i" converter, this currently gives an indication of the error. Under your proposed change, it would remove money from the account.
True. But can you come up with a reasonable example? A few of us have this problem, and almost everyone has agreed that hex constants are generally used in operations where the numeric value is not important, but the bit pattern is. I haven't seen a real example of where your scenario actually exists - not to mention that any such code would have to be new (as that constant does not work with "i" today) so therefore the author should use the new correct type code! I'm not sure if you are playing devil's advocate, or your contempt for our problem is real?
If we think that the case "large numbers are bitmaps" is more common than the case "large numbers are large numbers", we should drop the range check for the existing converters, and add new converters in case somebody wants large numbers instead of bitmaps, which then do the range checks.
No - no one is trying to say any of that at all. The problem is simply breaking existing code. That code was *not* broken in the first place. We understand the rationale - just we also have lots of existing code. [Jack]
This would be ideal, of course. But note that for me changing the format char is a minor issue, as long as the behavior of the new format char is as expected ... But of course I don't know how this would be for Mark...
Well, I wouldn't be happy, but it wouldn't kill me, but would have to be a semi-blind replace to keep me sane (Maybe I would just write a script to convert all my .py files with hex constants to decimal - the bitwise ops will still get me, but locating them may be OK.) Of course, someone will have to update PyXPCOM in the Mozilla tree, and any thing else using hex constants in that way but not actively maintained may struggle and become unavailable for a little while. Plenty of extension authors not on python-dev (including plenty of home-grown extensions taking win32con constants, for example), and obviously I can't speak for them. And as Jack's latest mail points out, supporting multiple versions of Python becomes almost impossible. The cost is real, and not able to be borne only by people on this list. Ultimately though, the end result is likely to be everyone just mass-replaces "i" with "?" in any set of code where they *may* have the problem - but carefully avoiding code where hex constants are passed as currency values <wink> Mark.