[Python-Dev] Making Queue.Queue easier to use

[Guido van Rossum]

On 10/11/05, Tim Peters <tim.peters at gmail.com> wrote:
> Guido understands use cases for blocking and non-blocking put/get, and
> Queue always supported those possibilities.  The timeout argument got
> added later, and it's not really clear _why_ it was added.  timeout=0
> isn't a sane use case (because the same effect can be gotten with
> non-blocking put/get).

In the socket world, a similar bifurcation of the API has happened
(also under my supervision, even though the idea and prototype code
were contributed by others). The API there is very different because
the blocking or timeout is an attribute of the socket, not passed in
to every call.

But one lesson we can learn from sockets (or perhaps the reason why
people kept asking for timeout=0 to be "fixed" :) is that timeout=0 is
just a different way to spell blocking=False. The socket module makes
sure that the socket ends up in exactly the same state no matter which
API is used; and in fact the setblocking() API is redundant.

--
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)