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Parade of the PEPs
To start off Developer's Day at the Python10 conference I gave a keynote ending in what I dubbed "the parade of the PEPs". It was a brief overview of all open PEPs, where I gave my highly personal and subjective opinion for each PEP. Later, I realized that this might have been of interest to other developers. I didn't take notes at the conference, so below is a different set of comments that I created from scratch during a single two-hour sitting on March 7, 2002. I intend to occasionally update this with new comments and new PEPs.
--Guido van Rossum
PEP 42 - Small Feature Requests - Hylton
Frankly, this is mostly a dumpster for "would be nice" ideas that don't have enough priority to ever get implemented. It seems nobody ever goes through this and finds a nice idea for which they write the code and submit a patch. So in effect, an idea that is moved to PEP 42 is worse off than one that is outright rejected -- it's in a zombie zone from which there is no possible escape either to heaven or to hell. How can we change this?
PEP 206 - 2.0 Batteries Included - Zadka
This is a good idea. But PythonLabs doesn't have the energy to carry it forward, nor does the original author. How can we make this a community effort?
PEP 209 - Adding Multidimensional Arrays - Barrett, Oliphant
March 28, 2002: My previous comments were based on several
misunderstandings. (E.g. slices in the new Numeric acts the same as
in the old version, and don't make copies as I mistakenly thought.)
Quoting Perry Greenfield:
There are more minor differences, but these are the major
backward compatiblity issues at the Python level. Two of
them should not be problems for most users using Python 2.2
or later. It does have a number of important enhancements,
but these are not a compatiblity issue. Probably the biggest
issues for its acceptance are:
[on incorporation into the Python core]
Well it's still our goal and we are working towards that end
(we are even beginning to look at converting the documentation
to the Python standard). There is a draft manual available.
I imagine it may be a year before there is a significant switch-
over of the community to start using it (assuming we are succesful
in getting them to do so).
On the other hand, I don't think that timescale should necessarily
be the driver for when (or whether) it is accepted into the core.
It could accepted into the core before that (they have different
names and can coexist) or well after that. I think that decision
should be made on a somewhat different basis.
[...] the new version is becoming more and more backward-
compatible. In fact, the major differences that remain are:
Paul Dubois sent me email supporting Perry's message, announcing that he'll be a Numarray user soon for one particular application. Paul also mentions the C API as the only nasty issue. He doesn't think that the performance problem for small array is much of an issue.
Based on this feedback, I expect that this PEP will move forward slowly but steadily. I expect that the authors will eventually provide me with a patch set to incorporate their code base into the Python CVS tree. Whether this will be for Python 2.3 or later I can't tell.
PEP 215 - String Interpolation - Yee
I don't foresee that the debate here will ever yield a clear conclusion. Some people think it's a clear case of YAGNI (You Ain't Gonna Need It), while others think this is the most important missing feature for beginning programmers. I don't know which side is right. Even if it's a needed feature, the syntax is problematic: the first $ in
print $"The area of a $x by $y rectangle is $z"
is very questionable, but none of the alternatives I've seen proposed (e.g. i"...") look very good either. We can't just always turn on string interpolation in literals because that would break existing code. Maybe "from __future__ import interpolation" would enable interpolation in string literals? (Only in literals!)
There's also the question whether to allow arbitrary expressions like
print "The area is ${x*y}"
PEP 216 - Docstring Format - Zadka
This has very little contents. Maybe it should be withdrawn? There are several other PEPs that deal with doc strings, notably 256-258, which I like much better.
PEP 228 - Reworking Python's Numeric Model - Zadka, van Rossum
This is way too much Py-in-the-sky. There are way too many unresolved issues, and many aren't even mentioned in the PEP. I think it should be rejected; maybe if there is interest in the future a task force or SIG could be created to explore this subject in more depth.
PEP 237 - Unifying Long Integers and Integers - Zadka, van Rossum
This one is already accepted, and we should implement phase B1 in Python 2.3. Need I say more?
PEP 239 - Adding a Rational Type to Python - Zadka
Like 228, I think this is not a realistic PEP, it's just a collection of open issues. A rational type seems to create more problems than it resolves.
Maybe, just maybe there could be an efficient rational type implemented in C (using Python longs of course) in an extension module. But that's just a matter of hard work, and nobody seems interested. In the mean time, if you need rational numbers, there are plenty of implementations in pure Python available (including Demo/classes/Rat.py).
PEP 240 - Adding a Rational Literal to Python - Zadka
Given my comments on 239, I propose to reject this.
PEP 242 - Numeric Kinds - Dubois
Nobody except the author seems to be interested in pursueing this. Personally, I think the idea is not particularly Pythonic -- the trend is towards fewer numeric types, nor more (see PEP 237). I believe the author has said that it would be better to retract the PEP.
PEP 243 - Module Repository Upload Mechanism - Reifschneider
Sure, nice, but this should be a community effort. Maybe Kapil's module repository project (Gideon, /usr/local/WWW/ftp.python.org/pub/www.python.org/sigs/catalog-sig) will bring new life to it?
I think the issue here is not so much software, but (a) setting up a server (or set of replicas) capable of being hit by the entire community, and (b) rallying the community into submitting all their code to the repository.
Another issue is review. I think CPAN hasn't completely solved this either (given the number of complaints I hear about non-working packages). How do you know which contributions are good? Count downloads? A "vote on this package" form?
What is the original author planning to do?
PEP 245 - Python Interface Syntax - Pelletier
Jim Fulton has said that this PEP was premature. I agree. It introduces a new keyword, 'interface', and I'm not yet convinced that that is needed. On the other hand, the way this is currently done in Zope also looks butt-ugly, so something may indeed be needed. I think that at some point in the future when we have more experience with using interfaces (especially in Zope 3) we'll go back to this PEP and see how much of it we can use. Maybe there should be a special status "frozen" meaning not rejected but also not under consideration for the near future? But with a different meaning than Py-in-the-sky -- this PEP at least has lots of concrete proposals and studies the consequences.
PEP 246 - Object Adaptation - Evans
I never even understood what this PEP was about until Alex Martelli explained it to me. I think it's similar to an operation in Zope 3 that looks for an adapter to a given object that implements a given interface. If the object itself implements the interface, it is returned itself; otherwise a table of registered adapters is searched systematically to find the most suitable adapter.
But that's about all I know of the subject, and I think it should remain a nice idea, until we have a standard way to talk about interfaces. So I think this will have "frozen" status (see above) at least as long as PEP 245.
I have to admit that I never read the whole PEP, and certainly never tried to read and understand the specification or the sample implementation, so maybe I'm still off base.
PEP 254 - Making Classes Look More Like Types - van Rossum
This PEP was intended to describe changes to the classic class implementation that would take it closer to new-style classes. I haven't made a start with this work, and I think maybe it's not necessary -- the classic clas simplementation may as well remain exactly the way it is, until it is simply dropped in Python 3000. Somewhere along the way, when we believe that most users are using new-style classes anyway, we should add warnings for uses of old-style classes. The PEP could be used to describe the timeframe for these warnings. But before then, we should first make sure that the entire standard library (and the demos and tools) use new-style classes. And that's not even going to happen in Python 2.3. Also, that may break user code that subclasses a particular standard class, e.g. if a user defines a subclass that depends on coercions, which aren't supported by new-style classes.
PEP 256 - Docstring Processing System Framework - Goodger
PEP 257 - Docstring Conventions - Goodger, van Rossum
PEP 258 - DPS Generic Implementation Details - Goodger
I'll discuss these together. I believe David Goodger is doing good work, and I still see frequent posts by him in the doc-sig. But I haven't been following this work at all. Since this doesn't affect the language, just a convention, I'm not particularly concerned about this.
PEP 262 - Database of Installed Python Packages - Kuchling
I think this was a distutils Py-in-the-sky project? Maybe someone should just implement this; I have no issues with that, but I don't particularly feel the need myself.
PEP 263 - Defining Python Source Code Encodings - Lemburg
This one is very close to being checked in. Martin and Marc-Andre are hashing out the implementation. When they are ready, I think I'll just approve it. There was some serious opposition by an outside expert, Stephen Turnbull, who wants us to define the language pure in terms of UTF-8, and implement encodings as site-specific (?) hooks. But nobody agreed with him, and I've responded myself saying that I think it's best to do it MAL's way.
PEP 265 - Sorting Dictionaries by Value - Griffin
This is a small idea that's very important to its proposer, but that IMO attempts to solve a problem that is better solved in some other way, e.g. by teaching newbies the correct algorithm/idiom. I note that the PEP uses sloppy language, e.g. it talks about "sorting a dictionary" while the dictionary itself is never sorted -- the PEP only proposes methods that return the items or keys in sorted order.
The PEP also suffers from lack of definiteness: it proposes a whole slew of alternatives frowm which I guess I am supposed to pick the one I like best. Making me the bad guy again. :-)
Finally, the proposed "reversed=<bool>" optional argument seems utterly application-specific.
I would like to reject this because it doesn't solve a general enough problem in a general enough way, it just clutters the dictionary API. I'd rather add dict.popitem(key).
PEP 266 - Optimizing Global Variable/Attribute Access Montanaro
PEP 267 - Optimized Access to Module Namespaces - Hylton
PEP 280 - Optimizing access to globals - van Rossum
These three should be considered together; at most one of them can be implemented (or maybe a hybrid). I would like one of them to be implemented eventually, because I think it may have a big performance benefit: not only avoiding dict lookups for globals and builtins, but also recognizing certain builtins in the parser and generating code that knows what the built-in does, like an opcode for len(x) and special code for "for i in range(x, y, z)".
I think that Montanaro's proposal is too complex. I like Hylton's version about as well as my own; his version has some optional features (like support for attributes of globals denoting "module.attribute") that I think aren't worth the added complexity.
At the last PythonLabs meeting, we decided to do something much less ambitious first, and see if there's time before 2.3 to do more after that is done. The less ambitious thing is to refactor the compiler, using a much more appropriate abstract parse tree, and introducing explicit multiple passes. I predict that this alone is already barely doable in the time left before 2.3 beta1 (July 17).
PEP 268 - Extended HTTP functionality and WebDAV - Stein
I'm all for this, but it's library development work, and I'm not going to do it.
It seems the author has dropped the ball, and nobody has picked it up. There's an actual prototype checked into the sandbox/Lib directory (strange name), from September 2001; maybe we should beat up the author to finish the work, or ask what he's waiting for.
PEP 269 - Pgen Module for Python - Riehl
I know Martin von Loewis doesn't like this (on account of its lack of generality, e.g. there's no way to change the lexer beyond defining the set of reserved words), but I think it might be somewhat useful for people experimenting with Python-like languages (e.g. Python preprocessors that add new keywords and syntax). Since pgen is pretty tightly bound to the Python distribution, it makes sense that an extension making pgen available to the Python programmer should also be in the Python distribution.
So, we should ask the author if he's planning to implement it. If not, it should probably be dropped for lack of interest.
PEP 270 - uniq method for list objects - Petrone
Same story as for PEP 265. As the battling cookbook entries on this topic prove, this is a lot harder to do in full generality than it seems. The PEP is unfinished: it doesn't even specify the required semantics! And why isn't the author's implementation included, if it's only 20 lines?
I propose to reject this, to save the author work (he should still reveal his implementation).
PEP 273 - Import Modules from Zip Archives - Ahlstrom
I like this concept. I haven't studied the PEP or the proposed implementation in detail, so I don't know if it always does the right thing. I hope that it will make it into 2.3.
PEP 274 - Dict Comprehensions - Warsaw
If we were to adopt dict comprehensions, this PEP says everything that needs to be said. But I don't even want to think about this for Python 2.3; I think it's way too minor a feature.
This would be a lot easier to adopt if there was a working implementation in patch form.
Sometimes it would be nice if things like this could be defined using hygienic macros or some other kind of preprocessor or whatever, and imported from a module, rather than requiring major hacking in the parser, the bytecode compiler, and the virtual machine.
PEP 275 - Switching on Multiple Values - Lemburg
I'm still not convinced that we need a switch statement, and the proposed syntax has problems: e.g. why only constants? why not allow ranges? In addition, it proposes many different alternatives without picking one.
The first alternative proposed by the PEP, however, doesn't add any new syntax but simply proposes that the parser recognizes a certain common pattern and generates better code for it. I'm all for that, provided it can be shown that the generated code is either significantly faster, significantly smaller, or both. This project would probably a lot easier after the compiler refactoring proposed above in the comments for PEPs 266, 267, 280.
PEP 276 - Simple Iterator for ints - Althoff
I made the mistake of telling the author that I found this butt-ugly. Whatever the words, I do think it flies in the face of being Pythonic. To me:
for i in 12:
print i
just doesn't look right. Maybe
for i in len(L):
print i, L[i]
is attractive, but somehow I just don't think this is the right solution.
PEP 277 - Unicode file name support for Windows NT - Hodgson
I don't know the status of this, but I believe this is already implemented or at least close to being implemented? Is it controversial amongst the Germans?
PEP 278 - Universal Newline Support - Jansen
I've sent Jack a bunch of devil's advocate questions. The issue is real, and I'd like to see it solved, but I'm wary that this is too much of a hack. Here's the list:
- What on earth is a source() call?
- Why not support setting the delimiter for output files too?
- The 't' mode conflicts with the use of this mode on Windows to be an explicit way to invoke the default text translation mode.
- Why can't 't' be used together with '+'? Text mode on Windows supports '+' AFAIK.
- How does this interact with xreadlines? With "for line in file" ?
- Why settle for a compile-time option that's off by default? That's asking for problems; people who turn it on will write code that uses the 't' mode and then find that it's not portable.
- You say that 't' mode is used by import. What about parsing source code from a string? What about Unicode strings?
- I think I need more clarification of your remark about locks. If the implementation can be abused to create core dumps, I'm not for it.
PEP 279 - Enhanced Generators - Hettinger
March 28, 2002: The author took my advice and removed the restartable iterators idea, which I had called evil in a previous comment. Here are my current comments:
- New builtin: indexed()
I like the idea of having some way to iterate over a sequence and its index set in parallel. It's fine for this to be a builtin.
I don't like the name "indexed"; adjectives do not make good function names. Maybe iterindexed()?
I don't like the start and stop arguments. If I saw code like
for i, j in iterindexed("abcdefghij", 5, 10): print i, jI would expect it to print5 f 6 g 7 h 8 i 9 jwhile the spec in the PEP would print5 a 6 b 7 c 8 d 9 eVery confusing. I propose to remove the start/stop arguments, or change the spec to:
def iterindexed(sequence, start=0, stop=None): i = start while stop is None or i < stop: try: item = sequence[i] except IndexError: break yield (i, item) i += 1This reduces the validity to only sequences (as opposed to all iterable collections), but has the advantage of making iterindexed(x, i, j) iterate over x[i:j] while reporting the index sequence range(i, j) -- not so easy otherwise.
The simplified version is still attractive because it allows arbitrary iterators to be passed in:
def iterindexed(collection): i = 0 it = iter(collection) while 1: yield (i, it.next()) i += 1 - Generator comprehensions
I don't think it's worth the trouble. I expect it will take a lot of work to hack it into the code generator: it has to create a separate code object in order to be a generator. List comprehensions are inlined, so I expect that the generator comprehension code generator can't share much with the list comprehension code generator. And this for something that's not that common and easily done by writing a 2-line helper function. IOW the ROI isn't high enough.
- Generator exception passing
This is where the PEP seems weakest. There's no real motivation ("This is a true deficiency" doesn't count :-). There's no hint as to how it should be implemented. The example has a "return log" statement in the generator body which is currently illegal, and I can't figure out to where this value would be returned. The example looks like it doesn't need a generator, and if it did, it would be easy to stop the generator by setting a global "please stop" flag and calling next() once more. (If you don't like globals, make the generator a method of a class and make the stop flag an instance variable.)
PEP 281 - Loop Counter Iteration with range and xrange Hetland
An alternative to irange() from PEP 212 (which is in the rejected pile, but doesn't have text explaining why it was rejected). As long as we're going to introduce a notation FOO(sequence) that returns a (lazy or otherwise) version of range(0,len(sequence)), I think using FOO==range is more confusing than anything else. IOW if we have to do this, invent a new name for it.
PEP 282 - A Logging System - Mick
I asked for this, and haven't even looked at it. But I like it already! I hope this can be implemented in 2.3.
PEP 284 - Integer for-loops - Eppstein, Ewing
Yet another way to address the fact that some people find
for i in range(10):
too ugly. My main gripe with this one is that
for 0 <= i < 10:
puts the index variable in the middle, rather than right after the for keyword. And in the case where the lower bound is a variable, this is confusing for the casual reader:
for i <= j < k:
looks similar to
for i in j, k:
but in one case the loop counter is j, in the other case it is i.
The good thing about this PEP is that it quotes and comments on all the previous PEPs that have attempted to solve this issue (204, 212, 276, and 281).
I think that the current parser generator will have to be abused severely to allow the two syntactic alternatives
for <target_list> in <expression_list>
and
for <expression> <comparison> <target> <comparison> <expression>
because a <target_list> can start with <expression> <comparison>.
Closing Remarks
Whew! That's all. Well, there are a few PEPs in the abandoned category that might deserve a comment, but I'll wait until someone wants to revive them. We should definitely make a clearer distinction between rejected and deferred PEPs. And no rejected PEP should be without an explanation for the rejection.