On 25 July 2011 01:33, Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> wrote:
We've actually been down the 'namespace object' road years ago (Steve Bethard even wrote a proto-PEP IIRC) and it suffered the same fate as most enum PEPs: everyone has slightly different ideas on what should be supported, so you end up being faced with one of two options: 1. Ignore some of the use cases (so some users still have to do their own
On Sun, Jul 24, 2011 at 3:47 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> wrote: thing)
2. Support all of the use cases by increasing the API complexity (so many users will still do their own thing instead of learning the new API)
For enums, I think we should just pick a solution. I'm in favor of Barry Warsaw's version, flufl.enum.
I generally like the flufl.enum API. There are two things it doesn't do. For new apis it is *usually* possible to just use strings rather than integers - and have your library do the mapping if an underlying api takes integers. For existing ones, for example many parts of the python standard library, we couldn't replace the integer values with enums without a lot of effort. If the flufl enums subclassed integer then replacing most of the existing constants in the standard library would be trivially easy (so we'd have a built-in use case). e The second use case, where you really do want to use integers rather than strings, is where you have flag constants that you "or" together. For example in the standard library we have these in r, gzip, msilib, some in xml.dom.NodeFilter, plus a bunch of others. It would be nice to add support for or'ing of enums whilst retaining a nice repr. I did collect a whole lot of emails from a thread last year and was hoping to put a pep together. I'd support flufl.enum - but it would be better if it was extended so we could use it in the standard library. All the best, Michael Foord
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