[Pyobjc-dev] Re: [Pythonmac-SIG] pyobjc / cocoa

[Bob Ippolito]

On Wednesday, Oct 16, 2002, at 14:54 America/New_York, Seth Delackner 
wrote:

> On Wednesday, October 16, 2002, at 06:18 , Bob Savage wrote:
>> I just want to point out one more thing: because these are part of 
>> the name of the method, and not truly labels, the following two 
>> methods are distinct:
>>
>> [obj message: arg1 withFoo: arg2];
>> [obj withFoo:arg2 message:arg1];
>>
>> Those are two different methods. This means that the Seth's system 
>> would not work at all (although I don't like it because it makes the 
>> relation between the 'labels' and arguments less clear).
>
> I may be wrong, but I disagree with your assessment.  There is only a 
> single mapping possible from my example (although now looking at it, 
> my example had a typo).  What I meant is:
>
> rt.call(obj, "message", arg1, "arg2name", arg2);
> # giving us the message name = "message:arg1name:arg2name"
>
> The method 'rt.call' would take arguments  [0] object to receive the 
> message, [1] first part of the message name, [2] .  Each subsequent 
> pair of arguments is interpreted as first the next chunk of the 
> message name and then the next part of the message arguments.
>
> Where is the ambiguity?  Also, since obj is really a python wrapper 
> class for Objective-C objects, one could probably make 'call' a method 
> (renamed to avoid conflicts) on the wrapper class, resulting in 
> something like:
>
> obj._call("message", arg1, "arg2name", arg2);

Surely you _could_ do something like this, relatively easily at that, 
but with this method you can't do any subclassing.

-bob