[Python-Dev] PEP 343 - Abstract Block Redux

Paul Moore p.f.moore at gmail.com
Sun May 15 15:25:00 CEST 2005


On 5/14/05, Brett C. <bac at ocf.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> Nick's was obviously directly against looping, but, with no offense to Nick,
> how many other people were against it looping?  It never felt like it was a
> screaming mass with pitchforks but more of a "I don't love it, but I can deal"
> crowd.

Agreed. That's certainly how I felt originally.

There were a *lot* of nice features with PEP 340. The initial
discussion had a lot of people enthusiastic about all the neat things
they could do with it. That's disappeared now, in a long series of
attempts to "fix" the looping issue. No-one is looking at PEP 343, or
Nick's PEP 3XX, and saying "hey, that's neat - I can do XXX with
that!". This makes me feel that we've thrown out the baby with the
bathwater. (Yes, I know PEP 342 is integral to many of the neat
features, but I get the impression that PEP 342 is being lost - later
iterations of the other two PEPs are going out of their way to avoid
assuming PEP 324 is implemented...)

Looping is definitely a wart. Looping may even be a real problem in
some cases. There may be cases where an explicit try...finally remains
better, simply to avoid an unwanted looping behaviour.

But I'll live with that to get back the enthusiasm for a new feature
that started all of this. Much better than the current "yes, I guess
that's good enough" tone to the discussion.

Paul.

PS Guido - next time you get a neat idea like PEP 340, just code it
and check it in. Then we can just badger you to fix the code, rather
than using up all your time on discussion before there's an
implementation :-)


More information about the Python-Dev mailing list