On Monday, September 30, 2019 at 12:24:30 AM UTC-4, Andrew Barnert via Python-ideas wrote:On Sep 29, 2019, at 16:41, Steven D'Aprano <st...@pearwood.info> wrote:
>
>> On Sun, Sep 29, 2019 at 11:27:32AM +0100, Oscar Benjamin wrote:
>>
>> That's the point that I would make as well. What can you do with an
>> object that is only known to be Subscriptable?
>
> I can subscript it. What did you expect the answer to be?
I think the idea here is that your type follows the “old sequence protocol”, where you can index it with 0, 1, … until you get an IndexError, without having to check __len__ first.
Since there are various bits of Python (including the iter function) that support this protocol, it’s odd that there’s no ABC for it. And it’s not just that it’s odd, it’s different from almost every other collection-related protocol in Python.
I think the only reasonable argument against this is that “old-style” means “legacy”, as in you shouldn’t be creating new classes like this. But I don’t think that argument is true. There are perfectly good use cases—like your infinite sequences—that are perfectly good old-style sequences and are not valid Sequences, and how else are you supposed to implement them? (Iteration is great, but sometimes random access matters.)
That's funny, I always thought of that as legacy. The iterator protocol has been a special case in so many proposals I've seen on this list. I think it's really ugly. Instead of collections.abc.OldStyleSequence, what do you think of adding something like InfiniteSequence to collections.abc instead? It's basically Sequence without __len__, __reversed__, or __count__. I don't see it getting much use though.
If I’m right about what you’re asking for, I think it’s a useful addition.
Of course the same protocol would accept all kinds of bizarre other things that support __getitem__ for different reasons, like the “I want to spell calling differently” thing, plus (somewhat less uselessly) typing._GenericAlias subclasses like typing.List. But I don’t think that’s a problem. Sure, it’s not ideal that your test would accept typing.List, but who’s going to pass the List pseudo-type to a function that clearly expects some kind of collection? If they get a different exception than they expected (a TypeError a few lines down, most likely), who cares? That seems like a consenting adults issue.
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