[Pythonmac-SIG] Finding what a broken alias refers to.

[Bob Ippolito]

On Jun 24, 2005, at 6:13 AM, Ronald Oussoren wrote:

>
> On 24-jun-2005, at 12:03, Bob Ippolito wrote:
>
>
>>
>> On Jun 24, 2005, at 5:41 AM, Ronald Oussoren wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>>
>>> On 24-jun-2005, at 0:52, has wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> Bob wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>> Is there a way I can contribute (using some of the time
>>>>>> slots I now try to put aside for Boost and the unreasonable
>>>>>> number of
>>>>>> things I intend to do)?
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Currently, all of the wrapped Carbon functionality is done with
>>>>> an  ancient, fragile and undocumented parser/generator called
>>>>> bgen, which  parses out Universal Headers and spits out
>>>>> potentially working Python  bindings.  In order to make a useful
>>>>> contribution to those modules,  you'd have to learn it, which
>>>>> really isn't worth doing.  For your own  purposes you could hack
>>>>> the C code it spits out directly, but unless  it's done with
>>>>> bgen, it's not going to end up in Python CVS.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I blame Joseph Heller myself.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>> Why? AFAIK he has nothing to do with the mess that's called
>>> bgen ;-). IIRC a little know programmer named Guido wrote that code.
>>>
>>> BTW. I agree with Bob's classification of bgen, and would like to
>>> add that it is not only undocumented but also hard to understand
>>> without documention.
>>>
>>>
>>
>> It was a relatively esoteric reference; Joseph Heller is the author
>> of Catch-22.  Basically, he meant that neither choice is good (and
>> I agree).
>>
>
> I knew that, but maybe the smiley was too small :-). The name looked
> familiar and Google helped me out.
>
> Someone with copious free time should build new Carbon wrappers, we
> can than ask if the existing wrappers can be dropped in a future
> version of Python. Sadly enough that probably is with python 2.6 at
> the earliest, which is a long way away.

The problem with Carbon wrappers is that they have such diminishing  
returns.  The longer you wait, the less reason there is to use Carbon  
in the first place.

If we just sit on our hands for another few years, all of the  
functionality in Carbon will be available elsewhere anyway :)

-bob