Suggested coding style

[MRAB]

On 26/09/2011 01:23, Devin Jeanpierre wrote:
>>   Why does it suck?
>
> The gist of what I was saying is that it's possible to define
> functions that do this "generically" so that one implementation of
> zfill can work with multiple implementations of strings. Having to
> reimplement every time when one implementation would do is bothersome
> and generally isn't done unless it has to be (thus why mmap lacks a
> zfill method). Having to do more work than necessary "sucks", as does
> having partial str implementations that don't do everything str does.
>
> Ideally, I would claim that if some interface will have multiple
> implementations, it should have as few methods as possible to make
> implementation as easy as possible, and move as much as possible
> _away_ from methods and into functions that work with arbitrary
> implementations of the interface. This minimizes the amount of work
> that must be done for implementors and thus makes life better.
>
[snip]
I would have thought that a better solution would be to specify a
minimal set of methods in an abstract superclass and write the
additional methods using that minimal set.

The concrete string implementations would be descended from the
superclass and would still be able to override the additional methods
with more efficient code were desired, such as in the 'str' class.