[Python-ideas] Adding a thin wrapper class around the functions in stdlib.heapq

[bunslow]

On Wed, Nov 22, 2017 at 10:52 PM, bunslow <bunslow at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'll just note the original proposal I made was specifically designed to
> be the minimum possible improvement, to avoid controversy (and e.g. a PEP).
>
> I agree that there are significant flaws and room for improvement in the
> current heapq module (which is why things like xheap exist), but even so
> it's still very useful as is, and the minimal OOP wrapper would go a long
> way towards usability of the current functionality (and of course "just use
> pip" is often not a viable course of action for certain developers). It
> seems that such a wrapper is widely (though not unanimously) approved.
>
> Next step I suppose is creating a bpo issue?
>
> On Wed, Nov 22, 2017 at 10:05 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 22 November 2017 at 11:00, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> So the question is more: why, with Python being the way it is, do the
>>> heap functions operate on a list? I think heapq.heapify is the answer:
>>> in linear time, it heapifies a list *in place*.
>>>
>>> I don't think there's any reason to have *both* interfaces to the heap
>>> functionality, but it certainly isn't illogical to try to treat a heap
>>> as a thing, and therefore have a Heap type.
>>>
>>
>> Right, the parallel here is that we have a "heapq" module for the same
>> reason that we have list.sort(), sorted(), and the bisect module, rather
>> than a single "SortedList" type. https://code.activestate.com/r
>> ecipes/577197-sortedcollection/ then provides an example of how to
>> combine those into a "SortedCollection" type.
>>
>> That said, I'm still in favour of adding an object-oriented wrapper to
>> either `collections` or the `heapq` module for all the classic OO reasons:
>>
>> - it makes it easier to reliably maintain the heap invariant (just drop
>> your list reference after passing it to the heap wrapper)
>> - it gives both human readers and static code analysers more information
>> to work with ("this is a heap" rather than "this is a list")
>> - it provides a hook for improved interactive help on heap instances
>>
>> I don't have any great concerns about potential confusion - the OO
>> wrapper will be easy enough to use that anyone that's unsure will likely
>> gravitate towards that, while the lower level `heapq` functions will remain
>> available for folks writing their own heap implementations.
>>
>> This effect would likely be even more pronounced if the OO wrapper were
>> made available as `collections.Heap` (`collections` already imports the
>> `heapq` module for use in the Counter implementation).
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Nick.
>>
>> --
>> Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
>>
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>
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