On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 11:02 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> wrote:
And PEP 422 is designed to make it easier to share a common __prepare__ method with different post processing.
A major use case for __prepare__() is to have the class definition use an OrderedDict. It's even a point of discussion in PEP 3115. While I agree with the the conclusion of the PEP that using only OrderedDict is inferior to __prepare__(), I also think defaulting to OrderedDict is viable and useful. Using __prepare__() necessitates the use of a metaclass, which most people consider black magic. Even when you can inherit from a class that has a custom metaclass (like collections.abc.ABC), it still necessitates inheritance and the chance for metaclass conflicts. While I'm on board with PEP 422, I'm not clear on how it helps here. If class namespaces were ordered by default then class decorators, which are typically much easier to comprehend, would steal yet another use case from metaclasses. The recent discussions on enums got me thinking about this. In some cases you want you class customization logic to be inherited. That's where you've got to use a metaclass. In other cases you don't. Decorators work great for that. If your class decorator needs to have ordering information, then you also have to use a metaclass. Having OrderedDict be the default class namespace would address that. -eric