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

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Tue Mar 13 23:10:58 CET 2007

Nick Coghlan wrote:

Generics can live quite happily inside modules and as methods on objects.

I can see a problem with this when applied to the pydoc problem discussed earlier.

Suppose pydoc were to define some generic functions for documenting an object. To avoid polluting the global namespace, the objects representing them are placed into the pydoc module.

Now I have a type that I want to make documentable, so I provide implementations of those functions. But to register those implementations, I have to import pydoc. So any time anyone uses my type, for whatever reason, they end up dragging in pydoc even if they have no intention of using it.

If instead of pydoc it's some third party module, the situation is even worse, since the module may not even be installed on the user's system.

So this scheme would seem to create undesirable dependencies.

-- Greg

More information about the Python-3000 mailing list