[Python-Dev] [Python-checkins] peps: Pre-alpha draft for PEP 435 (enum). The name is not important at the moment, as (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Mon Feb 25 16:29:53 CET 2013

Le Mon, 25 Feb 2013 06:45:27 -0800, Eli Bendersky <eliben at gmail.com> a écrit :

For preparing the draft PEP I ran through some stdlib, Twisted and personal code and there are tons of places that just need a simple enum for some sort of "state", meaningful return value, or similar.

There are also tons of public APIs which are now ints and would benefit from becoming named values, but only if doing so doesn't break compatibility (i.e. if they are still usable everywhere an int can be used).

I prefer to have a good solution to one problem than a poorer solution that tries to cover two unrelated problems. For "names for ints", Nick's named value proposal seems more relevant, but why mix the two together?

Because the whole functionality is not important enough to have two slightly different variations on it in the stdlib? And why is it a poorer solution exactly?

Really, there can be two kinds of enum values (or named values):

A third kind of value, which is partly int-compatible but not entirely, sounds like a byzantine subtlety to me.

Regards

Antoine.

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