[Python-ideas] Module aliases and/or "real names"

Michael Foord fuzzyman at voidspace.org.uk
Mon Jan 10 12:37:08 CET 2011


On 10 January 2011 11:26, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 11:11 AM, Ron Adam <rrr at ronadam.com> wrote:
> > On the python side of things, the attributes we've been discussing almost
> > never have anything to do with what most programs are written to do.
> Unless
> > it's a program written specifically for managing pythons various parts.
> It's
> > kind of like the problem of separating content, context, and presentation
> in
> > web pages.  Sometimes it's hard to do.
>
> Yep - 99.99% of python code will never care if this is ever fixed.
> However, the fact that we've started using acceleration modules and
> pseudo-packages in the standard library means that "things should just
> work" is being broken subtly in the stuff we're shipping ourselves
> (either by creating pickling problems, as in unittest, or misleading
> introspection results, as in functools and datetime).
>
> And if we're going to fix it at all, we may as well fix it right :)
>
>
I certainly don't object to fixing this, and neither do I object to adding a
new class / module / function attribute to achieve it.

However... is there anything else that this fixes? (Are there more examples
"in the wild" where this would help?)

The unittest problem with pickling is real but likely to only affect a very,
very small number of users. The introspection problem (getsource) for
functools and datetime isn't a *real* problem because the source code isn't
available. If in fact getsource now points to the pure Python version even
in the cases where the C versions are being used then "fixing" this seems
like a step backwards...


Python 3.2:
>>> import inspect
>>> from datetime import date
>>> inspect.getsource(date)
'class date:\n    """Concrete date type.\n\n ...'

Python 3.1:
>>> import inspect
>>> from datetime import date
>>> inspect.getsource(date)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  ...
IOError: source code not available

With your changes in place would Python 3.3 revert to the 3.1 behaviour
here? How is this an advantage?

What I'm really asking is, is the cure (and the accompanying implementation
effort and additional complexity to the Python object model) worse than the
disease...

All the best,

Michael Foord






> Cheers,
> Nick.
>
> --
> Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
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>



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