[Python-Dev] PEP 246, redux

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 04:36 PM 1/12/05 +0100, Alex Martelli wrote:
>I already know -- you told us so -- that if I had transitivity as you wish 
>it (uncontrollable, unstoppable, always-on) I could not any more write and 
>register a perfectly reasonable adapter which fills in with a NULL an 
>optional field in the adapted-to interface, without facing undetected 
>degradation of information quality by that adapter being invisibly, 
>uncontrollably chained up with another -- no error message, no nothing, no 
>way to stop this -- just because a direct adapter wasn't correctly written 
>and registered.

But why would you *want* to do this, instead of just explicitly 
converting?  That's what I don't understand.  If I were writing such a 
converter, I wouldn't want to register it for ANY implicit conversion, even 
if it was non-transitive!