[Python-3000] Discussions with no PEPs (original) (raw)

Barry Warsaw barry at python.org
Tue Mar 13 14:41:22 CET 2007

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On Mar 12, 2007, at 11:06 PM, Phillip J. Eby wrote:

In short, the very idea of 'isfile()' is wrong, wrong, wrong. At least, if your goal is to make libraries more robust and reusable. It leads inevitably to the brokenness seen in Pydoc -- and the comparable brokenness that existed in Zope prior to its replacing most introspection by adaptation. (To be honest, I'm assuming that those broken bits went away as soon as adaptation became the recommended option -- I don't know if it really did or not, as I haven't done any real Zope work in a few years.)

Two other things I wanted to mention. One, I do think adaptation is
an important (necessary?) aspect to any interface solution for
exactly the reasons you state. Second, I think the other thing that
bugs me about a pure-generics solution is that all the generic
functions seem to want to live in a global namespace. That's fine
for len() or iter() or keys(), but not so good for
all_nonbouncing_regular_delivery_members(). In that sense, for more
domain-specific functionality, it just seems that interfaces (w/ adaptation for that extra level of abstraction) is the object- oriented approach to generics.

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