PEP 354: Enumerations in Python

[Roy Smith]

In article <46l8ibFbnfgeU3 at individual.net>,
 greg <greg at cosc.canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:

> Paul Rubin wrote:
> 
> > Do you anticipate having parameters like socket.AF_INET that are
> > currently integers, become enumeration members in future releases?
> 
> Since these are derived from values defined
> as integers in C, it's probably better to leave
> them that way. There may be code that relies
> on them being integers or having those integer
> values.

On a thin API like python's socket module, adding anything which isn't 
there in the lower level is a mistake (and making AF_INET an enum member 
would be adding something which isn't there).

I just finished adding IPv6 support to a product that didn't have it 
before.  We've got a "platform independent" socket interface which treats 
the address family as opaque data.  It turns out, I had to make ZERO 
changes to this shim layer.  Had the layer known more about address 
families, I would have had a lot more work to do.

Consider, for example, Python running on a system with experimental 
AF_INET8 support at some point in the future.  As it stands now, the Python 
library code doesn't need to know there's a new address family if all you 
want to do is open raw AF_INET8 sockets.