[Python-ideas] User-defined literals

[Andrew Barnert]

On Jun 4, 2015, at 12:49, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> 
>> On Thu, Jun 4, 2015 at 12:14 PM, Andrew Barnert via Python-ideas <python-ideas at python.org> wrote:
>> But this isn't actually true. That BINARY_ADD opcode looks up the addition method at runtime and calls it. And that means that if you monkeypatch complex.__radd__, your method will get called.
> 
> Wrong. You can't moneypatch complex.__radd__. That's a feature of the language.

I may well have missed it, but I went looking through the Built-in Types library documentation, the Data Model and other chapters of the language reference documentation, and every relevant PEP I could think of, and I can't find anything that says this is true. 

The best I can find is the rationale section for PEP 3119 saying "there are good reasons to keep the built-in types immutable", which is why PEP 3141 was changed to not require mutating the built-in types. But "there are good reasons to allow implementations to forbid it" isn't the same thing as "all implementations must forbid it".

And at least some implementations do allow it, like Brython and one of the two embedded pythons. (And the rationale in PEP 3119 doesn't apply to them--Brython doesn't share built-in types between different Python interpreters in different browser windows, even if they're in the same address space.)
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