[Python-Dev] PEP 3147 (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Sat Apr 10 18:39:00 CEST 2010

Barry Warsaw wrote:

I don't have strong feelings about this. I thought it would be handy for future Python's to have access to this, but then, without access to previous version magic numbers, it probably doesn't help much. And as you say, CPython won't know about alternative implementation's tags.

So I'm willing to call YAGNI on it and just expose the current Python's magic tag. While we're at it, how about making both the tag and the number attributes of the imp module, instead of functions like .getmagic()? Of course we'd keep the latter for backward compatibility.

I think one of the virtues of the functions is making it bleedingly obvious to all concerned that these are read only values.

So +1 to only exposing the current version of the implementation tag and magic number, and +0 to doing so via attributes rather than functions.

(I'm still in favour of keeping the list of old tags and magic numbers in a source comment though - commenting them out rather than deleting them when updating them isn't a major hassle).

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan at gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list