Mailman 3 September 2012 - Python-ideas

Visually confusable unicode characters in identifiers
by Oscar Benjamin Oct. 5, 2012

Oct. 5, 2012

Having just discovered that PEP 3131 [1] enables me to use greek letters to represent variables in equations, it was pointed out to me that it also allows visually confusable characters in identifiers [2]. When I previously read the PEP I thought that the normalisation process resolved these issues but now I see that the PEP leaves it as an open problem. I also previously thought that the PEP would be irrelevant if I was using ascii-only code but now I can see that if a GREEK CAPITAL LETTER … [View More]

19 38

Deprecate the round builtin
by Mike Graham Oct. 3, 2012

Oct. 3, 2012

The builtin round function is completely useless. I've never seen anyone use it constructively. Usually people using it are new programmers who are not comfortable with or aware of string formatting. Sometimes people use it to poorly replicate functionality that's implemented correctly in the decimal module. Mike

24 41

Re: [Python-ideas] make decimal the default non-integer instead of float?
by Gregory P. Smith Oct. 1, 2012

Oct. 1, 2012

-cc: python-dev +cc: python-ideas On Sat, Sep 29, 2012 at 11:39 AM, Chris Angelico <rosuav(a)gmail.com> wrote: > On Sun, Sep 30, 2012 at 4:26 AM, Brett Cannon <brett(a)python.org> wrote: > > Does this mean we want to re-open the discussion about decimal constants? > > Last time this came up I think we decided that we wanted to wait for > > cdecimal (which is obviously here) and work out how to handle contexts, > the > > syntax, etc. > > Just to … [View More]

5 5

file API
by Mark Adam Sept. 28, 2012

Sept. 28, 2012

For some time now, I've wanted to suggest a better abstraction for the <file> type in Python. It currently uses an antiquated, low-level C-style interface for moving around in a file, with methods like tell() and seek(). But after attributes were introduced to Python, it seems like it should be re-evaluated. Let file-type have an attribute .pos for position. Now you can get rid of the seek() and tell() methods and manipulate the file pointer by the more standard and familiar … [View More]

11 11

bdist naming scheme (compatibility tags) PEP
by Daniel Holth Sept. 26, 2012

Sept. 26, 2012

Today pypy and CPython's "setup.py bdist" generate the same filename but incompatible bdists. This makes it difficult to share both bdists in the same folder or index. Instead, they should generate different bdist filenames because one won't work with the other implementation. This PEP specifies a tagging system that includes enough information to decide whether a particular bdist is expected to work on a particular Python. Also at https://bitbucket.org/dholth/python-peps/raw/98cd36228c2e/pep-… [View More]

5 26

Regex support code as std lib functions
by Matt Chaput Sept. 25, 2012

Sept. 25, 2012

I'm not sure where regex is in its long march toward replacing re, but I just noticed something interesting: the regex module seems to include implementations of some useful functions to support its regular expression matching, e.g.: - Levenshtein distance - Unicode case folding Both of these would be useful as fast functions in the std lib. If/when regex replaces re, any possibility all the useful functions that support it could be added to the std lib in the appropriate modules as … [View More]

2 1

Re: [Python-ideas] syntax to continue into the next subsequent except block
by V James Powell Sept. 20, 2012

Sept. 20, 2012

> I think it would be useful if there was a way to skip into the next except > block, perhaps with continue as I think it's currently always illegal to use > in an except block. I don't believe there's currently a way to do this. I would like to share that the original suggestion inspired me on the following (mis-)adventure. Cheers, V James Powell switch = lambda val: type('', (BaseException,), {'val': val})() case = lambda pred: type('', (type,), {'__subclasscheck__': … [View More]

1 0

syntax to continue into the next subsequent except block
by Paul Wiseman Sept. 20, 2012

Sept. 20, 2012

I think it would be useful if there was a way to skip into the next except block, perhaps with continue as I think it's currently always illegal to use in an except block. I don't believe there's currently a way to do this. This is my reasoning, often there's multiple reasons for exceptions that raise the same exception, as an example an IOError might get raised for lots of different reasons. If you want to handle one or several of these reasons, you have to catch all exceptions of this type, … [View More]

16 31

Why is there no way to pass PYTHONPATH on the command line?
by Gerald Britton Sept. 19, 2012

Sept. 19, 2012

On 19 September 2012 17:36, Gerald Britton <gerald.britton at gmail.com <http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas>> wrote: >* FYI This works in Windows:*>**>* C:\Python26>set PYTHONPATH=c:\temp & python*>* Python 2.6.4 (r264:75708, Oct 26 2009, 08:23:19) [MSC v.1500 32 bit (Intel)]*>* on*>* win32*>* Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.*>>>>* import sys*>>>>* sys.path*>* ['', 'c:\\… [View More]

1 1

Re: [Python-ideas] Why is there no way to pass PYTHONPATH on the command line?
by Gerald Britton Sept. 19, 2012

Sept. 19, 2012

FYI This works in Windows: C:\Python26>set PYTHONPATH=c:\temp & python Python 2.6.4 (r264:75708, Oct 26 2009, 08:23:19) [MSC v.1500 32 bit (Intel)] on win32 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> import sys >>> sys.path ['', 'c:\\temp', 'C:\\WINDOWS\\system32\\python26.zip', 'C:\\Python26\\DLLs', 'C :\\Python26\\lib', 'C:\\Python26\\lib\\plat-win', 'C:\\Python26\\lib\\lib-tk', ' C:\\Python26', 'C:\\Python26\\lib\\site-packages', 'C:\\… [View More]

2 1