[Python-3000] Minor addition to Python interactive shell...

[Abdallah El Guindy]

Of course I'm not discouraged =), rather convinced.. The feature's correct
place is outside of the core as you suggested! As for getting the index from
the docs, it is probably a good idea to look for that... Once I get some
free time, I'll give it some more thought..

Thanks again!

On Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 12:55 AM, Alex Martelli <aleaxit at gmail.com> wrote:

> You're welcome!  I wasn't trying to discourage you -- I was trying to
> prompt you to do it the best way, as a third party open source project
> (perhaps a contributed one to iPython, etc).  Brett suggests that the
> index might be already around somewhere (maybe just for the standard
> library, but that would be a start) so if you could locate it then the
> needed excepthook might not be too hard to write, etc, etc.  However,
> it's definitely up to you!
>
> Alex
>
> On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 2:45 PM, Abdallah El Guindy
> <abdallah.elguindy at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Adding a package to the repositories searched by apt-get is a much
> >> higher-ceremony operation than copying a file into some sys.path
> >> directory or changing sys.path, so that indexing makes sense for
> >> apt-get but not for Python's imports -- I can imagine the poor Python
> >> interpreter churning away all the time updating the index all the
> >> time.
> >
> > You are definitely right about that, I totally missed this when first
> > thinking about it...
> >
> >> there is absolutely
> >> nothing to be gained by having the functionality inside the core
> >> rather than in a third-party package.
> >
> > I guess you are right once again.
> >
> >> If and when your extension "takes the Python world by storm"
> >
> > I guess this is never gonna happen (that's why I probably tagged the
> feature
> > minor).
> >
> > I did not realized at the beginning that it has as much technical
> > complications.. Thanks for pointing that out, I'm convinced that perhaps
> it
> > is not a good idea after all.
> >
> > Thanks.
> >
> > On Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 12:35 AM, Alex Martelli <aleaxit at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 2:10 PM, Abdallah El Guindy
> >> <abdallah.elguindy at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> > I believe there must be a way... Maybe by creating an index file for
> >> > each
> >> > module. I'm not sure, but I think the number of packages on apt-get is
> >> > much
> >> > more than the number of python built-in modules (obviously I don't
> know
> >> > their number), yet it is doable with the case of apt-get.
> >>
> >> Adding a package to the repositories searched by apt-get is a much
> >> higher-ceremony operation than copying a file into some sys.path
> >> directory or changing sys.path, so that indexing makes sense for
> >> apt-get but not for Python's imports -- I can imagine the poor Python
> >> interpreter churning away all the time updating the index all the
> >> time.  And even then, the Python index WOULD still potentially miss
> >> some entries, because a Python module is vastly more dynamic than the
> >> totally-static repositories used by apt-get, where each package is
> >> mandated to very explicitly state what it requires, and what it
> >> provides.
> >>
> >> If you want to try your hand at this kind of extension, I recommend
> >> you do it as a pypi package -- since all you want is peculiar messages
> >> in response to some NameError or ImportError exceptions, you can hang
> >> your functionality neatly into sys.excepthook -- there is absolutely
> >> nothing to be gained by having the functionality inside the core
> >> rather than in a third-party package.  Moreover, I would recommend
> >> targeting the extension (solely or primarily) at "rich" environments
> >> such as IDLE or ipython (http://ipython.scipy.org/moin/), whose users
> >> already expect and obviously appreciate getting especially rich
> >> interactive functionality even if it comes at the potential cost of
> >> some overhead -- users of the Python built-in interactive interpreter
> >> are more likely to be after lean-and-mean functionality instead.
> >>
> >> If and when your extension "takes the Python world by storm", you will
> >> have strong practical arguments to recommend its inclusion in some
> >> future version of Python -- its popularity will have proven that there
> >> is strong demand for that functionality, after all.  Until such
> >> support does exist, it's hard to argue for including in the Python
> >> core offering something that can be done just as well as a 3rd party
> >> package, has no proven demand, AND presents potentially delicate
> >> tradeoffs in terms of implementation (is the user going to be asked to
> >> explicitly reindex each time they alter sys.path, or is the overhead
> >> of the reindexing going to be implicit in ANY alteration at all?  etc,
> >> etc).
> >>
> >>
> >> Alex
> >
> >
>
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