[stdlib-sig] Proposal: new "interpreter" module

[Brett Cannon]

On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 11:27 AM, Christian Heimes <christian at cheimes.de> wrote:
> Benjamin Peterson schrieb:
>
> > I originally brought this in the discussion about removing types, but it can
>  > be separate.
>  >
>  > Through the years, sys has gather a fare share of crud. Much of these new
>  > additions are low-level and CPython specific. I believe the sys module
>  > should strive to be an interpreter neutral, clean module. Hence, I propose
>  > the "interpreter" module. We could move all those internal functions like
>  > _getframe(), get/setrecursionlimit(), get/setcheckinterval(), etc to it.
>  > Also, if we decided to remove the types module, this would be a natural
>  > place for frames and code objects.
>
>  The idea popped up several months ago when we were discussion the future
>  of the types module. Guido suggested the name 'pyvm'. The module was
>  meant to contain low level interfaces to the (C)Python virtual machine.
>
>  Once the pyvm module is implemented the sys module should only contain
>  system methods which can be implemented by all flavors of Python.

This is exactly the type of separation I want to see. Unfortunately,
because it would be a new module that means we will have to go through
the typical steps needed to add it and can't rely on 2to3 and the
reorg to handle it.

But I totally support moving CPython-specific stuff to another module.
Probably the best thing to do is write up a proposal of what should go
where, run it past here, and the write up a PEP to present to
python-dev. Then we can introduce the module in 2.6/3.0. Proper
deprecations will be needed in the sys module so that people can
slowly transition to the new module (whether it is named interpreter,
pyvm, or some other name) since the sys module can't obviously just
suddenly drop some methods or attributes.

And do realize this is a chance to change the API so that if a
property-like situation is better than a method call that can be used.

Sound good to people? If so, who wants to take this on?

-Brett