[Python-Dev] Repo frozen for 3.2 (original) (raw)

R. David Murray rdmurray at bitdance.com
Tue Dec 7 03:30:08 CET 2010

On Mon, 06 Dec 2010 13:02:41 -0800, Raymond Hettinger <raymond.hettinger at gmail.com> wrote:

On Dec 6, 2010, at 11:40 AM, Fred Drake wrote: > On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 2:21 PM, Raymond Hettinger > <raymond.hettinger at gmail.com> wrote: >> We really ought to stop with the SafeFoo naming convention. >> It is only descriptive to the person who wrote the class or function, >> not to the user who will immediately wonder, "safe from what?" > > Safe from bad vampire movies, of course! > > I'd not recognize the current Safe* class names as a pattern; there > are currently two in the py3k trunk: > > configparser.SafeConfigParser > -- very much a poor name > > xmlrpc.client.SafeTransport > -- perhaps should have been SSLTransport or HTTPSTransport > > I agree the "Safe" prefix isn't meaningful.

IIRC, pprint has a saferepr() and string.Template has safesubstitute() and pydoc has a safe import. Never new there was so much danger in the standard library :-)

unittest has an (internal) safe_repr, too. I understand all four of these to be "versions of xxx that won't raise". I think that's a reasonable use of the word 'safe', but perhaps there is something better.

SafeConfigParser doesn't follow that pattern, of course, though it is perhaps true that it would raise errors a bit less often... :)

-- R. David Murray www.bitdance.com

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