[Python-Dev] [python/peps] PEP 567 review and copyedits (#503)

[Chris Angelico]

Redirecting comments from the PR to the ML. Everything that was
tightly bound to the PR has been dropped.

On Wed, Dec 13, 2017 at 12:15 PM, Yury Selivanov
<notifications at github.com> wrote:
> Most of your questions should be asked on python-dev. I'll answer them here, but if you have any follow-ups, please raise the on the ml.
>
>> What happens if you set, set again, then reset from the first one's token?
>
> The context will be reset to the state it was in before the first set, w.r.t. that variable's value.
>
>> A peek at the implementation shows that it simply resets the value, so aside from having magic that allows it to represent "no value", the token buys nothing that you couldn't get by simply returning the old value - which is a valuable API to have. Am I reading this correctly?
>
> "no value" is the main feature of Token, it what makes the PEP future compatible with PEP 550.

A lot of APIs are built to return the old value, not wrapped in any
sort of opaque token. If the "no value" magic were to be exposed
(contextvars.NO_VALUE as a specific sentinel value), this would allow
deliberate use of "previous value" as an actual part of the API. Does
futureproofing require that the token be opaque?

>> Implementation, _ContextData class - I don't often see "self.__mapping" in PEPs unless the name mangling is actually needed. Is it used here? Would "self._mapping" be as effective?
>
> __ is used to highlight the fact that all those attributes are private and inaccessible for Python code.

Just to clarify, then: this is an artifact of the Python reference
implementation being unable to perfectly represent the behaviour of C
code, but had you been writing this for actual implementation in the
stdlib, you'd have used a single underscore?

>> The HAMT for Context boasts O(log N) 'set' operations. What is N? Number of variables used? Number of times they get set? Number of times set w/o being reset?
>
> Number of ContextVars set in the context.

Thanks. Might be worth mentioning that; with the
semantically-equivalent Python code, it's obvious that the cost of the
copy scales with the number of unique variables, but without knowing
what the actual HAMT does, it's not so obvious that that's true there
too. The net result is that repeatedly setting the same variable
doesn't increase the cost - right?

Most of my questions were fairly straightforwardly answered in Yury's
response on the PR. One question about formatting has been
subsequently fixed, so all's well on that front too.

The PEP looks pretty good to me.

ChrisA