"Don't rebind built-in names*" - it confuses readers
Mark Janssen
dreamingforward at gmail.com
Wed Jun 12 20:26:43 EDT 2013
> The builtins don't need to be imported, but they're identifiers like
> anything else. They're a namespace that gets searched after
> module-globals.
Yes, I understand, though for clarity and separability, it seems that
having them in a namespace that gets explicitly pulled into the global
space is less messy, despite the extra step (the default python
distribution could include a STARTUP file that imports the builtin
types). But I must withhold my personal philosophy lest it get too
complicated.
>> And int, list, tuple, dict and such always seemed
>> like keywords to my CS self because they were included in Python's
>> type system (like "int" would be in C).
>
> Yep, but in Python, types/classes are themselves objects, so you can
> pass them around like anything else. This also downgrades them from
> "language keyword" to "always-available name", which in effect
> upgrades your _own_ classes to the same level.
Yes, and here is where I've been trying to argue that Python's object
model isn't right. But I must abstain from commenting further.
>> They are all one-step removed from keywords. And yet, since they are
>> not in a separate namespace, they should not be used as variable
>> names. Perhaps since they are very different from one another, they
>> should be put in separate namespaces off of a global, root
>> namespace... (math, string, etc.)
>
> There's no point forcing them to be looked up in a two-step process.
> If you want that, you can simply reference them as
> __builtins__.whatever, but you can instead just reference them as the
> unadorned name whatever. They contribute heavily to the simplicity and
> readability of Python code - imagine if every call to len() had to be
> qualified.
Well I would anticipate a keyword ("load"?) so one could load a
particular namespace into the global scope. The issue I guess is when
should modules be "on file" vs. "in memory" like the builtins? The
reason this is coming up, is because I would like to imagine a data
ecosystem, where I can import a set of objects from the network as if
they are local right into my interpreter environment.
--
MarkJ
Tacoma, Washington
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