[Python-Dev] More on contextlib - adding back a contextmanager decorator

Sun Apr 30 18:53:57 CEST 2006

On 4/30/06, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at iinet.net.au> wrote:
> A few things from the pre-alpha2 context management terminology review have
> had a chance to run around in the back of my head for a while now, and I'd
> like to return to a topic Paul Moore brought up during that discussion.

I believe the context API design has gotten totally out of hand.
Regardless of the merits of the "with" approach to HTML generation
(which I personally believe to be an abomination), I don't see why the
standard library should support every possible use case with a
custom-made decorator. Let the author of that tag library provide the
decorator.

I have a counter-proposal: let's drop __context__. Nearly all use
cases have __context__ return self. In the remaining cases, would it
really be such a big deal to let the user make an explicit call to
some appropriately named method? The only example that I know of where
__context__ doesn't return self is the decimal module. So the decimal
users would have to type

  with mycontext.some_method() as ctx:    # ctx is a clone of mycontext
      ctx.prec += 2
      <BODY>

The implementation of some_method() could be exactly what we currently
have as the __context__ method on the decimal.Context object. Its
return value is a decimal.WithStatementContext() instance, whose
__enter__() method returns a clone of the original context object
which is assigned to the variable in the with-statement (here 'ctx').

This even has an additional advantage -- some_method() could have
keyword parameters to set the precision and various other context
parameters, so we could write this:

  with mycontext.some_method(prec=mycontext.prec+2):
      <BODY>

Note that we can drop the variable too now (unless we have another
need to reference it). An API tweak for certain attributes that are
often incremented or decremented could reduce writing:

  with mycontext.some_method(prec_incr=2):
      <BODY>

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