[Python-Dev] conceptual clarity (original) (raw)

R. David Murray rdmurray at bitdance.com
Thu Sep 17 20:04:11 CEST 2009

On Thu, 17 Sep 2009 at 10:38, Peter Moody wrote:

On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 10:32 AM, R. David Murray <rdmurray at bitdance.com> wrote:

On Thu, 17 Sep 2009 at 09:16, Peter Moody wrote:

I mentioned before that IPy's insistence on receiving masked out networks was one of the main reasons I wrote ipaddr to begin with. Having ipaddr mimic this behavior would make it significantly less useful. Removing functionality in the name of avoiding confusion doesn't make sense when the same confusion can be alleviated w/o the loss. We're suggesting moving that functionality (accepting a non-masked IP plus netmask and returning the corresponding Network object) into a different constructor, not eliminating the functionality. Do you mean a new constructor function, ala IPAddress and IPNetwork (so the current classes remain largely the same and the various constructors enforce certain restrictions) or something else? At this point, I'm getting confused with the intermingling of class and constructor names.

I mean, eg, IPv4Network.fromHostIP('192.168.1.1/24').

Or some such name.

Having another constructor that took an IPv4Address object and a mask would probably be a good idea as well. These could be exposed as appropriately named module level functions instead/as well, of course.

I would have IPv4Address itself be strict, and thus the new constructors would compute the network address and call the regular IPv4Address constructor.(*)

--David

(*) If that's the part you object to (not recording the input IP in the Network object), then clearly you see a need to have an AddressWithMask object of some sort....

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