[Python-ideas] A different kind of context manager

[Kristján Valur Jónsson]

Thanks, Guido, This is in fact very interesting.
I'll be sure to not wildly speculate out of my posterior on these matters again, but refer to the facts :)
Another data point indicating that convergent evolution does, in fact, exist.

K


From: gvanrossum at gmail.com [mailto:gvanrossum at gmail.com] On Behalf Of Guido van Rossum
Sent: 24. október 2013 16:55
To: Kristján Valur Jónsson
Cc: python-ideas ideas
Subject: Re: [Python-ideas] A different kind of context manager

As log as we are speculating about the origins of language features, I feel the need to set the record straight.

I was not inspired by Ruby at that point (or ever :-). Ruby was in fact inspired by Python. Mats once told me that his inspiration was 20% Python, 80% Perl, and that Larry Wall is his hero.
I was inspired to implement new-style classes by a very specific book, "Putting Metaclasses to Work" by Ira Forman and Scott Danforth (http://www.amazon.com/Putting-Metaclasses-Work-Ira-Forman/dp/0201433052).
But even Python's original design (in 1990, published in 1991) had the notion that 'type' was itself an object. The type pointer in any object has always been a pointer to a special object, whose "data" was a bunch of C function pointers implementing the behavior of other objects, similar to a C++ vtable. The type of a type was always a special type object, which you could call a meta-type, to be recognized because it was its own type.
I was only vaguely aware of Smalltalk at the time; I remember being surprised by its use of metaclasses when I read about them much later. Smalltalk's bytecode was a bigger influence of Python's bytecode though. I'd read about it in a book by Adele Goldberg and others, I believe "Smalltalk-80: The Language and its Implementation" (http://www.amazon.com/Smalltalk-80-The-Language-its-Implementation/dp/0201113716).
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido<http://python.org/~guido>)
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