On Sat, 4 Mar 2000, Guido van Rossum wrote:

Before we all start writing nannies and checkers, how about a standard API design first?

I thoroughly agree -- we should have a standard API. I tried to write selfnanny so it could be callable from any API possible (e.g., it can take either a file, a string, an ast or a tuple representation)

I will want to call various nannies from a "Check" command that I plan to add to IDLE.

Very cool: what I imagine is a sort of modular PyLint.

I already did this with tabnanny, and found that it's barely possible -- it's really written to run like a script.

Mine definitely isn't: it's designed to run both like a script and like a module. One outstanding bug: no docos. To be supplied upon request <0.5 wink>. I just wanted to float it out and see if people think that this particular nanny is worth while.

Since parsing is expensive, we probably want to share the parse tree.

Yes. Probably as an AST, and transform to tuples/lists inside the checkers.

Ideas?

Here's a strawman API: There's a package called Nanny Every module in that package should have a function called check_ast. It's argument is an AST object, and it's output should be a list of three-tuples: (line-number, error-message, None) or (line-number, error-message, (column-begin, column-end)) (each tuple can be a different form). Problems? (I'm CCing to python-dev. Please follow up to that discussion to python-dev only, as I don't believe it belongs in patches) -- Moshe Zadka . http://www.oreilly.com/news/prescod_0300.html