[Python-3000] Discussions with no PEPs

[Barry Warsaw]

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On Mar 12, 2007, at 11:06 PM, Phillip J. Eby wrote:

> In short, the very idea of 'is_file()' is wrong, wrong, wrong.  At  
> least,
> if your goal is to make libraries more robust and reusable.  It leads
> inevitably to the brokenness seen in Pydoc -- and the comparable  
> brokenness
> that existed in Zope prior to its replacing most introspection by
> adaptation.  (To be honest, I'm *assuming* that those broken bits  
> went away
> as soon as adaptation became the recommended option -- I don't know  
> if it
> really did or not, as I haven't done any real Zope work in a few  
> years.)

Two other things I wanted to mention.  One, I do think adaptation is  
an important (necessary?) aspect to any interface solution for  
exactly the reasons you state.  Second, I think the other thing that  
bugs me about a pure-generics solution is that all the generic  
functions seem to want to live in a global namespace.  That's fine  
for len() or iter() or keys(), but not so good for  
all_nonbouncing_regular_delivery_members().   In that sense, for more  
domain-specific functionality, it just seems that interfaces (w/ 
adaptation for that extra level of abstraction) is the object- 
oriented approach to generics.

- -Barry

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