[Python-Dev] Why are contexts also managers? (was r45544 - peps/trunk/pep-0343.txt) (original) (raw)

Phillip J. Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Wed Apr 19 17:30:00 CEST 2006

At 11:10 PM 4/19/2006 +1000, Nick Coghlan wrote:

Ah, all is explained by svn blame, with a little help from svn log.

When Phillip went through to make the terminology consistent he actually swapped the meanings of "context" (which meant 'has a context method' in the original PEP)

At least AMK and I thought that it was obvious that "context manager" means "has a context method", and it's the only way to have the PEP read consistently.

Note that the decorator is called @contextmanager, not @context, for example.

and "context manager" (which meant 'has enter and exit methods and a context method that returns self' in the original PEP).

That's true - before there was a context method. Now that there is a context method, it makes more sense to say that the thing that has it is the context manager, and the thing with the enter/exit methods is the context.

I clearly wasn't paying attention when that diff went past on the checkins list, but I'd humbly request that we change it back :)

The change made the PEP self-consistent in its terminology, if you are encountering it for the first time, and don't already have it in your head that it's one way or the other. If we change it the other way, we'll have to rename @contextmanager.

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