[Python-Dev] PEP 3144 review.

[Antoine Pitrou]

R. David Murray <rdmurray <at> bitdance.com> writes:
> 
> I would find that acceptable but sub-optimal.  Most of my use cases
> (which involve manipulating router and firewall configuration files) would
> then start by making a little class named AddressWithNetwork to hold the
> tuple returned by your parse function, with attributes 'ip' and 'network'
> and a representation that included the netmask.

If the AddressWithNetwork class has useful functionality of its own, then why
not (although I think that conceptually, this functionality should belong to the
Network class instead).

If, however, the AddressWithNetwork class is only a recipient for a tuple, then
it sounds useless. It's like having an AddressWithPort to hold things like
"127.0.0.1:8080". Building little featureless recipients like that isn't really
idiomatic Python, IMO.

> An IPv4Address with 'network' and 'mask' attributes that could be
> None would also not complicate the API, IMO, and would handle both
> of these use cases.

But it would be confusing and conceptually bizarre, because an address (in
usually accepted terminology) doesn't have a network and a mask.
I think we should keep the API clean and reasonably logical, rather than try to
cover all use cases at the expense of weird shortcuts.

Regards

Antoine.