[Python-Dev] Great Renaming - Straw Man 0.2

[Moshe Zadka]

On Sun, 26 Mar 2000, Ka-Ping Yee wrote:

> The following also could be left at the top-level, since
> they seem like applications (i.e. they probably won't
> get imported by code, only interactively).  No strong
> opinion on this.
> 
>     bdb
>     pdb
>     pyclbr
>     tabnanny
>     profile
>     pstats

Let me just state my feelings about the interpreter package: since Python
programs are probably the most suited to reasoning about Python programs 
(among other things, thanks to the strong introspection capabilities of
Python), many Python modules were written to supply a convenient interface
to that introspection. These modules are *only* needed by programs dealing
with Python programs, and hence should live in a well defined part of the
namespace. I regret calling it "interpreter" though: "Python" is a better
name (something like that java.lang package)

> Also... i was avoiding calling the "unix" package "posix"
> because we already have a "posix" module.  But wait... the
> proposed tree already contains "math" and "time" packages.

Yes. That was a hard decision I made, and I'm sort of waiting for Guido to
veto it: it would negate the easy backwards compatible path of providing
a toplevel module for each module which is moved somewhere else which does
"from import *".

> If there is no conflict (is there a conflict?) then the
> "unix" package should probably be named "posix".

I hardly agree. "dl", for example, is a common function on unices, but it
is not part of the POSIX standard. I think "posix" module should have
POSIX fucntions, and the "unix" package should deal with functinality
available on real-life unices.

standards-are-fun-aren't-they-ly y'rs, Z.
--
Moshe Zadka <mzadka@geocities.com>. 
http://www.oreilly.com/news/prescod_0300.html
http://www.linux.org.il -- we put the penguin in .com