On Wed, May 26, 2021 at 11:57 AM Steven D'Aprano
On Wed, May 26, 2021 at 02:09:58AM +1000, Chris Angelico wrote:
Remember: The thing that you declare Final will, some day, need to be changed. Probably as part of your own test suite (you do have one of those, right?). With MyPy, you could tell it not to validate that line, or that file. With a naming convention, you can explain the need for the change with a comment. How are you going to override the language feature?
That depends on how it is implemented. Here are some thoughts. Given:
constant spam = "spam and eggs"
we might be able to change it like this:
# Rebinding a constant raises a warning. Just ignore the warning. try: spam = "spam spam spam spam" except Warning: pass
# Write directly to the namespace. globals()['spam'] = "spam spam spam spam"
# Command line switch or environment variable. python3.11 --no-constants testsuite.py
# Context manager. with ConstantEnforcement(False): spam = "spam spam spam spam"
# Special backdoor. sys.setconstant('spam', "spam spam spam spam")
Enforcing constantness doesn't necessarily imply there is no way to disable or work around it. Especially in a consenting adults language like Python, I would expect that there will be.
(Most likely just write directly to the namespace.)
And the very presence of such an option means that these things are not constant, meaning that the interpreter and the programmer cannot assume they are constant. Especially if there's a way to globally disable constness. (My guess is that writing directly to the namespace, or "import some_module; some_module.spam = 42", would bypass it.) So how long will it be before some library has a thing declared as a constant, and some user of that library overrides it in production? I give it a week, but only because I doubt that const would be heavily used. If it were, I'd give it a day. ChrisA