[Python-Dev] PyTypeObject type names in Modules/ (original) (raw)

Eli Bendersky eliben at gmail.com
Tue Jan 1 17:23:14 CET 2013

On Tue, Jan 1, 2013 at 8:15 AM, Benjamin Peterson <benjamin at python.org>wrote:

2013/1/1 Eli Bendersky <eliben at gmail.com>: > Hello and happy 2013, > > Something I noticed earlier today is that some C versions of stdlib modules > define their name similarly to the Python version in their PyTypeObject. > Some examples: Decimal, xml.etree's Element. Others prepend an understore, > like pickle.Pickler and many others. > > What are the tradeoffs involved in this choice? Is there a "right" thing for > types that are supposed to be compatible (i.e. the C extension, where > available, replaces the Python implementation seamlessly)? > > I can think of some meanings for pickling. Unpickling looks at the class > name to figure out how to unpickle a user-defined object, so this can affect > the pickle/unpickle compatibility between the C and Python versions. What > else?

I don't it's terribly important except if the object from the C module is directly exposed through the API it's nicer if it's name doesn't have a leading underscore.

Hi Benjamin,

Can you elaborate - what you mean by "is directly exposed through the API"?

For example, Pickler in 3.x:

import pickle pickle.Pickler.name 'Pickler' pickle.Pickler.module '_pickle' -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20130101/a342c0ee/attachment.html>

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