Mailman 3 July 2018 - Python-ideas

Dart like multi line strings identation
by Marius Räsener 08 Feb '19

08 Feb '19

Hey List, this is my very first approach to suggest a Python improvement I'd think worth discussing. At some point, maybe with Dart 2.0 or a little earlier, Dart is now supporting multiline strings with "proper" identation (tried, but I can't find the according docs at the moment. probably due to the rather large changes related to dart 2.0 and outdated docs.) What I have in mind is probably best described with an Example: print(""" I am a multiline String. """) the closing quote defines the "margin indentation" - so in this example all lines would get reduces by their leading 4 spaces, resulting in a "clean" and unintended string. anyways, if dart or not, doesn't matter - I like the Idea and I think python3.x could benefit from it. If that's possible at all :) I could also imagine that this "indentation cleanup" only is applied if the last quotes are on their own line? Might be too complicated though, I can't estimated or understand this... thx for reading, Marius

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Pypi private repo's
by Nick Humrich 29 Oct '18

29 Oct '18

I am sure this has been discussed before, and this might not even be the best place for this discussion, but I just wanted to make sure this has been thought about. What if pypi.org supported private repos at a cost, similar to npm? This would be able to help support the cost of pypi, and hopefully make it better/more reliable, thus in turn improving the python community. If this discussion should happen somewhere else, let me know. Nick

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Re: [Python-ideas] [Distutils] Pypi private repo's
by Nick Coghlan 28 Oct '18

28 Oct '18

On 5 April 2018 at 07:58, Jannis Gebauer <ja.geb(a)me.com> wrote: > What if there was some kind of “blessed” entity that runs these services and puts the majority of the revenue into a fund that funds development on PyPi (maybe trough the PSF)? Having a wholly owned for-profit subsidiary that provides commercial services as a revenue raising mechanism is certainly one way to approach something like this without alienating sponsors or tax authorities (although it may still alienate the vendors of now competing services). It would require a big time commitment on the PSF side to get everything set up though, as well as interest from key folks in joining what would essentially be a single-language-focused start up in an already crowded cross-language developer tools marketplace. When the PSF as a whole is still operating with only a handful of full or part time employees, it's far from clear that setting something like that up would be the most effective possible use of their time and energy. At a more basic level, that kind of arrangement technically doesn't require anyone's blessing, it could be as straightforward as downstream tooling vendors signing up as PSF sponsors and saying "please allocate our sponsorship contribution to the Packaging WG's budget so that PyPI keeps operating well and the PyPA tooling keeps improving, increasing the level of demand for our commercial Python repository management services". Historically that wouldn't have helped much, since the PSF itself has struggled with effective project management (for a variety of reasons), but one of the things I think the success of the MOSS grant has shown is the significant strides that the PSF has made in budget management in recent years, such that if funding is made available, it can and will be spent effectively. Cheers, Nick. P.S. PyPA contributors are also free agents in their own right, so folks offering Python-centric developer workflow management tools or features may decide that it's worth their while to invest more directly in smoothing out some of the rough edges that currently still exist. It's a mercenary way of looking at things, but in many cases, it is *absolutely* possible to pay for the time and attention of existing contributors, and if you can persuade them that your proposals are reasonable, they'll often have an easier time than most convincing other community contributors that it's a good way to go :) -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan(a)gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia

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Asynchronous exception handling around with/try statement borders
by Erik Bray 24 Sep '18

24 Sep '18

Hi folks, I normally wouldn't bring something like this up here, except I think that there is possibility of something to be done--a language documentation clarification if nothing else, though possibly an actual code change as well. I've been having an argument with a colleague over the last couple days over the proper way order of statements when setting up a try/finally to perform cleanup of some action. On some level we're both being stubborn I think, and I'm not looking for resolution as to who's right/wrong or I wouldn't bring it to this list in the first place. The original argument was over setting and later restoring os.environ, but we ended up arguing over threading.Lock.acquire/release which I think is a more interesting example of the problem, and he did raise a good point that I do want to bring up. </prologue> My colleague's contention is that given lock = threading.Lock() this is simply *wrong*: lock.acquire() try: do_something() finally: lock.release() whereas this is okay: with lock: do_something() Ignoring other details of how threading.Lock is actually implemented, assuming that Lock.__enter__ calls acquire() and Lock.__exit__ calls release() then as far as I've known ever since Python 2.5 first came out these two examples are semantically *equivalent*, and I can't find any way of reading PEP 343 or the Python language reference that would suggest otherwise. However, there *is* a difference, and has to do with how signals are handled, particularly w.r.t. context managers implemented in C (hence we are talking CPython specifically): If Lock.__enter__ is a pure Python method (even if it maybe calls some C methods), and a SIGINT is handled during execution of that method, then in almost all cases a KeyboardInterrupt exception will be raised from within Lock.__enter__--this means the suite under the with: statement is never evaluated, and Lock.__exit__ is never called. You can be fairly sure the KeyboardInterrupt will be raised from somewhere within a pure Python Lock.__enter__ because there will usually be at least one remaining opcode to be evaluated, such as RETURN_VALUE. Because of how delayed execution of signal handlers is implemented in the pyeval main loop, this means the signal handler for SIGINT will be called *before* RETURN_VALUE, resulting in the KeyboardInterrupt exception being raised. Standard stuff. However, if Lock.__enter__ is a PyCFunction things are quite different. If you look at how the SETUP_WITH opcode is implemented, it first calls the __enter__ method with _PyObjet_CallNoArg. If this returns NULL (i.e. an exception occurred in __enter__) then "goto error" is executed and the exception is raised. However if it returns non-NULL the finally block is set up with PyFrame_BlockSetup and execution proceeds to the next opcode. At this point a potentially waiting SIGINT is handled, resulting in KeyboardInterrupt being raised while inside the with statement's suite, and finally block, and hence Lock.__exit__ are entered. Long story short, because Lock.__enter__ is a C function, assuming that it succeeds normally then with lock: do_something() always guarantees that Lock.__exit__ will be called if a SIGINT was handled inside Lock.__enter__, whereas with lock.acquire() try: ... finally: lock.release() there is at last a small possibility that the SIGINT handler is called after the CALL_FUNCTION op but before the try/finally block is entered (e.g. before executing POP_TOP or SETUP_FINALLY). So the end result is that the lock is held and never released after the KeyboardInterrupt (whether or not it's handled somehow). Whereas, again, if Lock.__enter__ is a pure Python function there's less likely to be any difference (though I don't think the possibility can be ruled out entirely). At the very least I think this quirk of CPython should be mentioned somewhere (since in all other cases the semantic meaning of the "with:" statement is clear). However, I think it might be possible to gain more consistency between these cases if pending signals are checked/handled after any direct call to PyCFunction from within the ceval loop. Sorry for the tl;dr; any thoughts?

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Positional-only parameters
by Victor Stinner 10 Sep '18

10 Sep '18

Hi, For technical reasons, many functions of the Python standard libraries implemented in C have positional-only parameters. Example: ------- $ ./python Python 3.7.0a0 (default, Feb 25 2017, 04:30:32) >>> help(str.replace) replace(self, old, new, count=-1, /) # <== notice "/" at the end ... >>> "a".replace("x", "y") # ok 'a' >>> "a".replace(old="x", new="y") # ERR! TypeError: replace() takes at least 2 arguments (0 given) ------- When converting the methods of the builtin str type to the internal "Argument Clinic" tool (tool to generate the function signature, function docstring and the code to parse arguments in C), I asked if we should add support for keyword arguments in str.replace(). The answer was quick: no! It's a deliberate design choice. Quote of Yury Selivanov's message: """ I think Guido explicitly stated that he doesn't like the idea to always allow keyword arguments for all methods. I.e. `str.find('aaa')` just reads better than `str.find(needle='aaa')`. Essentially, the idea is that for most of the builtins that accept one or two arguments, positional-only parameters are better. """ http://bugs.python.org/issue29286#msg285578 I just noticed a module on PyPI to implement this behaviour on Python functions: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/positional My question is: would it make sense to implement this feature in Python directly? If yes, what should be the syntax? Use "/" marker? Use the @positional() decorator? Do you see concrete cases where it's a deliberate choice to deny passing arguments as keywords? Don't you like writing int(x="123") instead of int("123")? :-) (I know that Serhiy Storshake hates the name of the "x" parameter of the int constructor ;-)) By the way, I read that "/" marker is unknown by almost all Python developers, and [...] syntax should be preferred, but inspect.signature() doesn't support this syntax. Maybe we should fix signature() and use [...] format instead? Replace "replace(self, old, new, count=-1, /)" with "replace(self, old, new[, count=-1])" (or maybe even not document the default value?). Python 3.5 help (docstring) uses "S.replace(old, new[, count])". Victor

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Fwd: Replacing Infinite while Loops with an Iterator: async edition
by jab＠math.brown.edu 24 Aug '18

24 Aug '18

On Jun 23, 2018, at 21:11, Nathaniel Smith <n...(a)pobox.com> wrote: > He's asking for an async version of the 'iter' builtin, presumably > something like: > async def aiter(async_callable, sentinel): > while True: > value = await async_callable() > if value == sentinel: > break > yield value > -n Yes, exactly (thanks, Nathaniel). Wouldn't that be a useful built-in? (Greg, I too would be surprised if this were the first time this idea has been raised, but I looked before posting and couldn’t immediately find prior discussion.)

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Redefining method
by Jamesie Pic 20 Aug '18

20 Aug '18

Hi all, Not sure if this subject has been brought up already, but why can't we redefine methods as such for example: c = MyClass o = c() def c.foo(cls): ... def o.bar(self): ... Thanks in advance for sharing some of your insight -- ∞

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Python docs page: In what ways is None special
by Jonathan Fine 16 Aug '18

16 Aug '18

This arises out of PEP 505 - None-aware operators. I thought, a page on how None is special would be nice. I've not found such a page on the web. We do have === https://docs.python.org/3/library/constants.html None The sole value of the type NoneType. None is frequently used to represent the absence of a value, as when default arguments are not passed to a function. Assignments to None are illegal and raise a SyntaxError. === So decided to start writing such a page, perhaps to be added to the docs. All code examples in Python3.4. Here's my first attempt. I'm sure I've missed some important examples. Please help, if you can. None is a keyword ============== >>> None = 0 SyntaxError: can't assign to keyword >>> import keyword >>> keyword.kwlist ['False', 'None', 'True', 'and', 'as', 'assert', 'break', 'class', 'continue', 'def', 'del', 'elif', 'else', 'except', 'finally', 'for', 'from', 'global', 'if', 'import', 'in', 'is', 'lambda', 'nonlocal', 'not', 'or', 'pass', 'raise', 'return', 'try', 'while', 'with', 'yield'] The Command Line Interpreter hides None ================================= >>> None >>> None is false in a boolean context ========================== >>> bool(None) False Procedures return None ================== >>> a = [3,1,2] >>> b = a.sort() >>> a, b ([1, 2, 3], None) Dictionary get returns None if not found ============================== >>> {}.get('dne') is None True None is default return value ===================== >>> def fn(): pass ... >>> fn() # No response! >>> print(fn()) # Here's why. None None is used as a sentinel default value ============================== Particularly useful when default value must be determined in body of function. --- def insort_right(a, x, lo=0, hi=None): # ... if hi is None: hi = len(a) --- Thank you for your attention. What have I missed? -- Jonathan

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Is this PEP-able? "with" statement inside genexps / list comprehensions
by Rudy Matela 11 Aug '18

11 Aug '18

Hello, Do you think it would be nice to allow with statements inside genexps or list comprehensions? The functions __enter__ and __exit__ would be automatically called as iterables are traversed. I am thinking of drafting a PEP about this. Examples: This g = (f.read() for fn in filenames with open(fn) as f) would be equivalent to the following use of a generator function: def __gen(): for fn in filenames: with open(fn) as f: yield f.read() g = __gen() This list = [f.read() for fn in filenames with open(fn) as f] would be equivalent to the following: list = [] for fn in filenames: with open(fn) as f: list.append(f.read()) -- Rudy

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Re: [Python-ideas] PEP 505: None-aware operators: operators ?= and ?? and OR
by Jonathan Fine 03 Aug '18

03 Aug '18

Hi > There is a formatted version of this PEP at > https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0505/ I've taken a look at this, and have some comments on the first two examples drawn from standard library code. (And a very grateful +10 for writing a script to find such examples.) I've started a subthread, just to discuss the ?= and ?? operators. And something newish, that I call OR. FIRST EXAMPLE The first example is --- >From bisect.py: def insort_right(a, x, lo=0, hi=None): # ... if hi is None: hi = len(a) --- Here, None is a sentinel value. The simpler code --- hi = hi or len(a) --- fails when hi is zero (or any other value that is False in the boolean context). This can be fixed by introducing a new operator OR which is similar to 'or' but has the semantics this example requires. Thus, given OR we can write --- hi = hi OR len(a) --- where (A OR B) returns A if A is not None, otherwise it returns B. (Recall that (A or B) returns A if bool(A), otherwise it returns B.) SECOND EXAMPLE The second example is --- >From calendar.py: encoding = options.encoding if encoding is None: encoding = sys.getdefaultencoding() optdict = dict(encoding=encoding, css=options.css) --- Once we have OR we would write this as --- encoding = encoding OR sys.getdefaultencoding() optdict = dict(encoding=encoding, css=options.css) --- And from here we can condense into a single (longish) line: --- optdict = dict(encoding=encoding OR sys.getdefaultencoding(), css=options.css) -- SUMMARY Here, for reference, are the suggestions using ?= and ?? in PEP 505. --- hi ??= len(a) --- optdict = dict(encoding=encoding ?? sys.getdefaultencoding(), css=options.css) --- Comments ?? suggestions. For example, would a None-aware AND operator be useful? -- Jonathan

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