Why no warnings when re-assigning builtin names?

Tim Chase python.list at tim.thechases.com
Tue Aug 16 14:34:53 EDT 2011


On 08/16/2011 12:11 PM, Seebs wrote:
> Under which circumstance will you have more problems?
>
> 1.  There is not a single shadowed built-in in the entire project.
> 2.  There are dozens of shadowed built-ins based on when the original
> programmer felt there wasn't going to be a need for a given built-in
> feature, or possibly just didn't know about it.

In practice, I've never hit such a snag.  For #2, the only way it 
would impact me is if I did the ill-advised

   from shadowy import *

which might tromp on things I care about.  Otherwise, I'd just do 
something like

   from shadowy import list as shadowy_list, id as shadowy_id

If I'm altering another person's ill-created module, I might 
consider doing a search for builtins and then just simply 
patching the module so that it renamed all the shadowing usages. 
  Unless the author was being particularly obscure (using scope 
to impact where a builtin meant the builtin, and other scopes to 
shadow the builtins), most authors are pretty consistent in their 
shadowing (usually ignorant of the fact they're shadowing the 
builtin) which makes the search-n-replace an easy tweak.

-tkc








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