Paul Prescod writes:

Michael Hudson wrote:

...

... I propose adding a fourth, optional, "flags" argument to the builtin "compile" function. If this argument is omitted, there will be no change in behaviour from that of Python 2.1.

If it is present it is expected to be an integer, representing various possible compile time options as a bitfield.

Nit: What is the virtue to using a C-style bitfield? The efficiency isn't much of an issue. I'd prefer either keyword arguments or a list of strings.

Err, hadn't really occured to me to do anything else, to be honest! At one point I was going to use the same bits as are used in the code.co_flags field, which was probably where the bitfield idea originated. By "keyword arguments" do you mean e.g: compile(source, file, start_symbol, generators=1, division=0) ? I think that would be mildly painful for the one use I had in mind (the additions to codeop), and also mildly painful to implement. compile(source, file, start_symbol,{'generators':1, 'division':0}) would be better from my point of view. I think this is a bit of a propeller-heads-only feature, to be honest, so I'm not that inclined to worry aobut the API. Cheers, M. -- 3. Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon. -- Alan Perlis, http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html