Clashing cmp
Guido van Rossum
guido at cnri.reston.va.us
Tue Sep 21 16:04:52 EDT 1999
"Fred L. Drake, Jr." <fdrake at acm.org> writes:
> Francois Pinard writes:
> > There is a builtin function named `cmp', but there is also an importable
> > module `cmp' in the standard library. After a mere `import cmp' (I prefer
> > to avoid `from cmp import SUCH-and-SUCH' if I may), I feel forced to write
> > `__builtins__.cmp' to access the builtin function.
> > This does not look very elegant to me. Would not it be better if such
> > elementary clashes were avoided, at least within the standard distribution?
> This tells me nobody has cared about the module until now. If this
> is indeed the case, should it even remain "standard"? I'd be happy to
> either give it a new name (suggestions?), or call it obsolete.
> Removing it is unlikely to break old code.
My suggestion would be to collect the functionality of cmp.py,
cmpcache.py, dircmp.py, and perhaps even dircache.py together in a new
filecmp module. This looks like a reasonable amount of work; if we
can't find a volunteer to do it, we'll have to conclude that nobody
cares about any of these 4 modules and declare them all obsolete.
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
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