Hmm, is setting a flag to switch twixt normal and another namespace really all that tricky? It would probably help to know how Python handles namespaces already, but I don't. In fact, I don't know Python well enough to do much more than speculate on how it's implemented. I was just figuring that the syntax and API are the harder parts to do well, anyhow, so I suggested in that mode. That NO evaluation is done before entry is a bit of a surprise. Obviously, the number of arguments is stored and checked, since TypeError is raised on argument number mismatches. There are obviously various ways to accomplish this, but the idea was, I confess, unconstrained by implementation details I don't know. Some possibilities that pop to mind: Such things could be held in a list, much like object properties or classes, which is available to be interrogated by the parser. When checking the argument list, it could also check lists for associated enums. If functions are complete objects, you could embed the information in the object for each specified argument in some standard way. 'function.__enums__()' maybe It seems that the function, on call, would need to know to check these things or not, but that's something that could be handled behind the scenes with a block to test that's simply conditionally skipped or added as needed. That would still require that the values be processed differently while being interpreted, unless some global rule was instituted to get around it. (Late-parsing arguments might work, or making sure that the names of variables are passed as strings to the function, so the function can ignore incorrectly-parsed identifiers. Of course THAT would require a tone more processing, or would preclude multiple values, so I really don't like it.) Actually, if our hearts aren't set on passing the enum names as identifiers, we could pass them as strings that are parsed on the other side. (rules for combining them would be part of the standard enum object definition.) This wouldn't look as neat to me, but it would move the namespace issue completely inside the recipient function. A function could fake it or actually use the the enum functions based on string parsing. def Box: def SetMake( new_make=enum(pcmake)["ibm"] ) ... b.SetMake("apple") Beyond that, it's mostly just a matter of determining proper behavior for an enum object type and the events it should raise, etc. (An extended dictionary class which stashes {key:(key,value)} could work as a basis.) -Nate
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Spectral One