[Python-ideas] 'Injecting' objects as function-local constants

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Sun Jun 19 08:56:30 CEST 2011


On Sun, Jun 19, 2011 at 3:41 PM, Raymond Hettinger
<raymond.hettinger at gmail.com> wrote:
> ISTM, it would be much better if language change proposals came
> in the form of:  "change X makes the following code better and is
> worth the breaking of code Y and making person Z relearn what
> the feature does."  That would get to essentials while taking the
> unpersuasive "I was surprised" off the table.

Indeed. If anyone was curious as to why I've been recently trying to
steer the discussion back specifically towards Jan's original idea of
replacing current (ab)uses of the default argument hack (and nothing
more), this is pretty much it.

We *know* those use cases exist because there is code in the wild that
uses them (including in the standard library). Saying "don't do that"
isn't an adequate response as, for anyone that knows about the hack
and how it works, the alternatives are far harder to read (in addition
to being far more verbose and error prone to write in the first
place).

Extrapolating to additional functionality that is difficult or
impossible in current Python code is sheer speculation that is likely
to weigh down any proposal with unnecessary cruft that gets it
rejected.

What is needed now is one or more volunteers that are willing and able to:

1. Write a PEP that:
  - distils the core discussion in this thread down into a specific
proposal that can be brought up on python-dev
  - explains *why* the default argument hack is undesirable in general
(unintuitive, hard to look up, harmful to introspection, invites
errors when calling affected functions)
  - clearly articulates the uses of the default argument hack that the
proposal aims to eliminate (early binding, shared locals, performance)
  - include real world example of such uses from the standard library
(and potentially other code bases)
  - optionally, also describe the potential "function factories" that
could be developed based on the semantics I proposed (see Eric Snow's
post for a sketch of how such factories might work once given a
template function to work with)
2. Create a reference implementation targeting Python 3.3

(with step 1 being significantly more important at this stage - while
the implementation can't be called *easy*, it should be a reasonably
straightforward combination of the existing code that handles nonlocal
statements and that which handles the calculation and storage of
default arguments).

I'm not going to do it myself (I already have a couple of open PEPs
that I need to make the time to follow up on), but I'm more than happy
to provide pointers and advice to someone else that steps up to do so.

Cheers,
Nick.

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



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