Dec. 31, 2002
5:13 p.m.
Cleanliness. I believe in invertible representations. Whenever I write a class, I like to have its str() or repr() emit something parseable. If nothing else, this is useful for debugging. This is just general principles, I don't (unlike my other changes) have a use case for it.
I don't like classes whose str() or repr() can be many lines in a typical case. Since this is read from a file, there should be (and is) a method to write it to a file; if there's no use case for converting the whole shebang to a string, don't provide that, and especially not as str() or repr(). --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)