[Python-Dev] towards a faster Python (original) (raw)

David Ascher DavidA@ActiveState.com
Tue, 10 Jun 2003 10:30:51 -0700

Barry Warsaw wrote:

On Tue, 2003-06-10 at 10:36, Neil Schemenauer wrote:

What I mean by reassigning builtins is: import builtin builtin.int = something

IMO the only defensible reason to do that is for debugging purposes. Although I haven't had a need for this in many years, it has occasionally been useful to reassign built-in open() to catch or log a particular file action. (IIRC, the last time I did this was before the resulting IOError included the filename argument.) I've done it to find out how often and when open() is called in a large application.

A warning is fine -- even desirable. I'd want to make sure such debugging hacks didn't make it into a release. :)

In this case too, I wouldn't mind warnings. I would mind it if I had to hack my libc to track python-level open() calls =).

--david