On 31 May 2016 at 16:08, Steven D'Aprano
On Tue, May 31, 2016 at 03:39:14PM +0100, Paul Moore wrote:
[I still prefer "call the RHS with the name of the LHS as the argument" over "inject the name of the LHS as the first argument of the call present on the RHS", btw -
Do I understand that you think that the RHS should be limited to callables that take a single argument only?
Yes. Or more specifically, expressions that evaluate to a callable. Because as you said in your original post, once you start allowing injection into anything more complicated than a "simple call" the whole thing gets messy. It's possible you could somehow restrict what's allowed, but not easy - IIRC, the complications around what was originally allowed in the position of a decorator were similar. Also, needing to have the "wrong" number of arguments on the RHS seems like it would lead to confusion: T => TypeVar() x => sympy.Symbol() cls => type(bases, ns) Record => nametuple(fields) Compare the calls on the RHS to the documentation. It'd probably also play havoc with IDEs that do signature introspection.
So far we have four real use-cases:
T = TypeVar('T') x = sympy.Symbol('x') cls = type('cls', bases, ns) Record = nametuple('Record', fields)
You would only support the first two cases and leave the others with the status quo? That seems like a strange restriction to make. What problem do you think the other two use-cases would cause that the first two don't?
The idea was that the second pair can easily be handled using functools.partial. So there's no loss of functionality, just a (small) inconvenience. Having said that, I've just checked functools.partial, and it doesn't appear to allow for inserting an argument at the *start* of the argument list. Bah. But you could still do def mktype(bases, ns): return lambda cls: type(cls, bases, ns) def mknamedtuple(fields) return lambda name: namedtuple(name, fields) cls => mktype(bases, ns) Record => mknamedtuple(fields) ... and if this were a language feature, there's nothing stopping mknamedtuple being added to the collections module (and mktype somewhere, maybe operator). But conceded, it's a limitation. My feeling is that the benefit in terms of simpler semantics is worth it, but I can see your POV as well. Paul