[Python-3000] Principles (was: Two proposals for a new list-like type: one modest, one radical)

[Josiah Carlson]

Bill Janssen <janssen at parc.com> wrote:
> > Base types should be as simple as possible.
> Is that really a good idea?  Wouldn't we wind up with BLISS (unsigned
> integers)?

With everything, there is a balance.  I do not advocate *removing*
functionality to make an object simpler; that would be absurd.  On the
other hand, when we already have types that are necessarily as simple as
possible to implement a reasonable set of functionality (lists, tuples,
integers, floats, dictionaries, str, etc.), I think that's a good
starting point.

Now, do we replace a structure which is very easy to understand and
maintain with a structure that necessarily isn't as easy to understand
and maintain? What if it breaks 3rd party code that expects the old
implementation? At what point do we say that certain performance
improvements are or are not significant enough to balance API breakage,
performance assumptions, etc.?

I believe that no performance improvement warrants such large scale
breakage of 3rd party extensions.  This is the same reason why I didn't
support the string view+concatenation mechanism that was offered by
Larry Hastings.


> I think it's always desirable to provide more useful base
> types, but that it has to be balanced against conversion and
> maintenance costs.

Indeed.  As a base type, I don't believe a BTree implementation
replacing the array implementation of a list is a good thing.

Guido seems to be against the addition of yet another type into
collections (which has defaultdict and deque in 2.5).  Me, I'd be happy
to have this object in collections (as I said, I've implemented this
kind of thing before).

Depending on my mood, I may even support replacing the deque
implementation with the Daniel's BTree, as the timings that Daniel has
provided show that inserting and deleting is quite fast for moderately
sized sequences (10k elements).  When people ask, "I want a list-like
thing that is able to do X", we can tell them, "use a deque, it's really
fast for just about everything".  Later when people invariably ask, "if
it's fast for most everything, why doesn't it replace list?" we can tell
them, "it breaks too many 3rd party extensions that rely on the
array-based implementation of list."


 - Josiah