[Python-ideas] PEP 511: API for code transformers

[Yury Selivanov]

On 2016-01-17 7:36 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
> On 17 January 2016 at 21:48, Victor Stinner<victor.stinner at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> >2016-01-16 12:06 GMT+01:00 Petr Viktorin<encukou at gmail.com>:
>>> >>The PEP is designed optimizers. It would be good to stick to that use
>>> >>case, at least as far as the registration is concerned. I suggest noting
>>> >>in the documentation that Python semantics*must*  be preserved, and
>>> >>renaming the API, e.g.::
>>> >>
>>> >>     sys.set_global_optimizers([])
>> >
>> >I would prefer to not restrict the PEP to a specific usage.
> The problem I see with making the documentation and naming too generic
> is that people won't know what the feature is useful for - a generic
> term like "transformer" accurately describes these units of code, but
> provides no hint as to why a developer might care about their
> existence.
>
> However, if the reason we're adding the capability is to make global
> static optimizers feasible, then we cam describe it accordingly (so
> the answer to "Why does this feature exist?" becomes relatively self
> evident), and have the fact that the feature can actually be used for
> arbitrary transforms be an added bonus rather than the core intent.

+1.

Yury