On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 6:50 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> wrote:
FWIW, since that last discussion, I've switched to using strings for my special constants, dumping them in a container if I need some kind of easy validity checking or iteration.
Unfortunately, some of the problems with that involve unicode normalization, and won't show up in English. Python has defined a normalization for identifiers; this normalization does not apply to quoted strings. Essentially, this is the same problem string exceptions caused, except that it (sometimes) applies to '==' as well as to 'is'. Essentially, we want the simplicity of: color=enum(red, green, blue) except that we *also* want to able to compare the symbols to (int or str) constants, and to decide when they will be equal. I don't see any good way to support: color=enum(red=15, green, blue) without requiring either that strings be used instead of symbols, or that later entries be explicitly initialized. -jJ