[Python-3000] pep 3124 plans (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Mon Jul 23 01:47:39 CEST 2007

Phillip J. Eby wrote:

Well, if you're looking at run-time, then you can equally well dump out the runtime contents of a generic function,

I'm not talking about doing this at run time. I'm talking about reasoning about what the program will do, based on your knowledge of what the run-time type will be.

With a normal method call, you can take an assumed run-time type, start at one end and follow things through step by step. That's not so easy with generic functions, for two reasons: (1) all of the arguments can potentially influence where the control flow goes, and (2) the overloading code can be anywhere in the program, not confined to the classes involved.

I'm not saying this makes GFs impossible to use, but they do make the programmer's world considerably more complicated. You can't just brush these concerns off as being no worse than what OO already provides.

I don't think that anybody's saying that unrestricted use of dynamism is good, or that it can't be abused. However, the potential for abuse is no different.

I'm not talking about abuse. I'm only talking about using GFs the way they're meant to be used. There's more to think about in the presence of GFs even without any abuse.

-- Greg

More information about the Python-3000 mailing list