[Python-Dev] PEP 343 - Abstract Block Redux

[Brett C.]

Paul Moore wrote:
> 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.
> 

Oh good.  So I am not nuts.  =)

> 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...)
> 

My feelings exactly.  I was really happy and excited when it seemed like
everyone really liked PEP 340 sans a few disagreements on looping and other
things.  Having a huge chunk of people get excited and liking a proposal was a
nice contrast to the whole decorator debate.

> 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.
> 

Which I think is actually fine if they do just use a try/finally if it fits the
situation better.

> 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.
> 

Ditto.

-Brett