[Python-Dev] Inconsistent behaviour in import/zipimport hooks

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 04:33 PM 11/9/2005 -0800, Guido van Rossum wrote:
>On 11/9/05, Phillip J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
> > By the way, while we're on this subject, can we make the optimization
> > options be part of the compile() interface?  Right now the distutils has to
> > actually exec another Python process whenever you want to compile
> > code with
> > a different optimization level than what's currently in effect, whereas if
> > it could pass the desired level to compile(), this wouldn't be necessary.
>
>Makes sense to me; we need a patch of course.

But before we can do that, it's not clear to me if it should be part of the 
existing "flags" argument, or whether it should be separate.  Similarly, 
whether it's just going to be a level or an optimization bitmask in its own 
right might be relevant too.

For the current use case, obviously, a level argument suffices, with 'None' 
meaning "whatever the command-line level was" for backward 
compatibility.  And I guess we could go with that for now easily enough, 
I'd just like to know whether any of the AST or optimization mavens had 
anything they were planning in the immediate future that might affect how 
the API addition should be structured.