[Python-ideas] PEP 3155 - Qualified name for classes and functions

[Barry Warsaw]

On Nov 09, 2011, at 02:32 PM, Jim Jewett wrote:

>qname seems to be well established for XML.  Do you fear that the q
>doesn't look enough like a prefix, and they won't recognize it as a
>type of name, or only that they won't know what makes this type of
>name special?

I think it will be easy to misread __qname__ as __name__ and it won't be
obviously clear what the difference between them is.

>> Python has always valued readability over writing convenience, and I think
>> this is one of Guido's founding brilliant insights: code is read far more
>> often then it is written.  And yet, he managed to find elegant ways of
>> expressing code clearly without being overly verbose.
>
>Frankly, I wouldn't know precisely what a "qualified name" is, and I
>can only guess based on my painful experience with other systems -- of
>which XML is by far the least ugly.  I'm not sure a standard
>abbreviation makes things any worse.  ("Fully Qualified Name" isn't as
>bad, but clearly runs afoul of succinctness.)

Isn't that a problem with the basic terminology then?  If you don't know what
a "qualified name" is you probably won't know what a "qname" is, and you
definitely won't make that connection.  I think that's more reason to find the
right terminology and spell it out.

-Barry
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