What do you use as symbols for Python?

[Björn Lindström]

Gary Herron <gherron at digipen.edu> writes:

> Another similar approach that keeps those values together in a single
> namespace is this (my favorite):
>
>  class State:
>      OPENED, CLOSED, ERROR = range(3)
>
> Then you can refer to the values as
>    State.OPENED
>    State.CLOSED
>    State.ERROR

Of course, with this solution you still get this problem:

  class State:
      OPENED, CLOSED, ERROR = range(3)

  class Spam:
        EGGS, HAM, TOAST = range(3)

  State.ERROR == Spam.TOAST             => True

Thus, the solutions using unique objects for each value seems cleaner,
and closer to actual symbols, to me.

I don't see why Python doesn't go all the way and add a real symbol
type, though. I've seen way too many ugly string or integer based
solutions.

-- 
Björn Lindström <bkhl at stp.lingfil.uu.se>
Student of computational linguistics, Uppsala University, Sweden