[Python-ideas] constant/enum type in stdlib (original) (raw)

Eli Bendersky eliben at gmail.com
Wed Jan 30 03:45:07 CET 2013

On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 3:26 PM, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz>wrote:

Eli Bendersky wrote:

I really wish there would be an enum type in Python that would make sense. ISTM this has been raised numerous times, but not one submitted a good-enough proposal.

I think the reason the discussion petered out last time is that everyone has a slightly different idea on what an enum type should be like. A number of proposals were made, but none of them stood out as being the obviously right one to put in the std lib. Also, so far nobody has come up with a really elegant solution to the DRY problem that inevitably arises in connection with enums. Ideally you want to be able to specify the names of the enums as identifiers, and not have to write them again as strings or otherwise provide explicit values for them. That seems to be very difficult to achieve cleanly with Python syntax as it stands.

Since we're discussing a new language feature, why do we have to be restricted by the existing Python syntax? We have plenty of time before 3.4 at this point.

Eli -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/attachments/20130129/bdd492c7/attachment.html>

More information about the Python-ideas mailing list