Re: html documentation and question about Stevens objects

Guido.van.Rossum@cwi.nl
Thu, 10 Feb 1994 17:28:03 +0100

Yesterday, Roland Holzapfel wrote:

> I'm new to python, just read the tutorial and some and the other
> stuff, and tried to install the hypertext documentation (html),
> locally on my site.

> Problem: all the gif icons are not supported in the .tar.Z file and,
> adionally, the HREFS inside the documents are absolute links to CWI :-(
> Guido, are you going to fix this, or can I get the gif icons as a
> tar file, too ?

I'm sorry, but the tar file with the html files was really a quick
hack. It would require some sort of script to fix the icon
references. Someone has to write it (in Python of course!). If you
write it I will be happy to run it over the files befor tarring them
up.

A better route would probably be to fetch the Perl source to the
latex2html converter that I used (pointers to its author are in the
About... section of the html dopcument, and the author maintains
pointers to the source). You can then run it on the latex files from
the Python distribution.

> Another question concerns the object model from Steven P.Miale,
> described in his thesis paper:
>
> Will these objects be included to python ? Or are they available as
> an extension ? When ? Where ? Why not ? ...?

Which object model? (I must admit my memory of the thesis is a bit
rusty.) If you are referring to the access restrictions, yes, that's
going to be implemented. (Actually most of the code already exists,
but there are some semantic and syntactic problems that I need to sort
out before making it an "official" part of Python. Read
accessobject.c for more info.) If you are referring to leaving "self"
out of method definitions, that won't happen -- I considered it for a
while but decided it wouldn't lead to more clarity in Python code.
Also, Steve's implementation was nice to test out the idea but did not
really work under all circumstances; it would require a major rewrite
of parts of the interpreter to fix this.

--Guido van Rossum, CWI, Amsterdam <Guido.van.Rossum@cwi.nl>
URL: <http://www.cwi.nl/cwi/people/Guido.van.Rossum.html>