Hi, Le 22/10/2011 22:18, Steven D'Aprano a écrit :
I'm just going to repeat what I've said before: explicit is better than implicit. If you want the name of an object (be it a class, a module, a function, or something else), you should explicitly ask for the name, and not rely on its str().
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But for the sake of the argument, I'll grant you that we're free to change str(cls) to return the class name, as requested by the OP, or the fully qualified module.class dotted name as suggested by you. So let's suppose that, after a long and bitter debate over which colour to paint this bikeshed, you win the debate.
Hm. Sometimes we want the class name, sometimes module.class, so even with the change we won’t always be able to use str(cls).
But this doesn't help you at all, because you can't rely on it. It seems to me that the exact format of str(cls) is an implementation detail. You can't rely on other Pythons to do the same thing, nor can you expect a guarantee that str(cls) won't change again in the future. So if you care about the exact string that gets generated, you still have to explicitly use cls.__name__ just as you do now.
This is a very good point. The output of repr and str is not (TTBOMK) exactly defined or guaranteed; nonetheless, I expect that many people (including me) rely on some conversions (like the fact that repr('somestr') includes quotes). So we can change str(cls) and say that *now* it has defined output, or leave it alone to avoid breaking code that does depend on the output, which can be seen as a wrong thing or a pragmatic thing (“I need it and it works”). Regards