[Python-Dev] Autoloading? (Making Queue.Queue easier to use) (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Wed Oct 12 16:58:10 CEST 2005

On 10/12/05, Michael Chermside <mcherm at mcherm.com> wrote:

I'm not familiar with the clever trick Greg is proposing, but I do agree that IF everything else were equal, then Queue seems to belong in the threading module. My biggest reason is that I think anyone who is new to threading probably shouldn't use any communication mechanism OTHER than Queue or something similar which has been carefully designed by someone knowlegable.

I still disagree. At some level, Queue is just an application of threading, while the threading module provides the basic API (never mind that there's an even more basic API, the thread module -- it's too low-level to consider and we actively recommend against it, at least I hope we do).

While at this point there may be no other "applications" of threading in the standard library, that may not remain the case; it's quite possble that some of the discussions of threading APIs will eventually lead to a PEP proposing a different threading paradigm build on top of the threading module.

I'm using the word "application" loosely here because I realize one person's application is another's primitive operation. But I object to the idea that just because A and B are often used together or A is recommended for programs using B that A and B should live in the same module. We don't put urllib and httplib in the socket module either!

Now, if we had a package structure, I would sure like to see threading and Queue end up as neighbors in the same package. But I don't think it's right to package them all up in the same module.

(Not to say that autoloading is a bad idea; I'm -0 on it for myself, but I can see use cases; but it doesn't change my mind on whether Queue should become threading.Queue. I guess I didn't articulate my reasoning for being against that well previously and tried to hide behind the load time argument.)

BTW, Queue.Queue violates a recent module naming standard; it is now considered bad style to name the class and the module the same. Modules and packages should have short all-lowercase names, classes should be CapWords. Even the same but different case is bad style. (I'd suggest queueing.Queue except nobody can type that right. :)

-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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