[Python-Dev] User's complaints (original) (raw)

Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven ashemedai at gmail.com
Thu Jul 13 14:02:22 CEST 2006

Hi Bob,

On 7/13/06, Bob Ippolito <bob at redivi.com> wrote:

Adding open classes would make it easier to develop DSLs, but you'd only be able to reasonably do one per interpreter (unless you mangled the class in a "with" block or something).

The person whose 'complaints' I was stating says that DSLs (Domain Specific Languages for those who, like me, were confused about the acronym) are a big part of what he is after and one per interpreter is fine by him. He also realises that the application(s) he needs them for might be unusual. He doesn't specifically need the builtin types to be extendable. It's just nice to be able to define a single class in multiple modules. Even C++ allows this to some extent (but not as much as he'd like).

He understands the implications of allowing open classes (import vs. no import changes semantics, etc.). Personally, he doesn't care too much about newbie safety since he's not a newbie. To quote verbatim: "give me the big guns :-)"

And while we're at it, he also stated: "[...] add multiple dispatch to your list of improvements for Python".

I hope this clarifies it a bit for other people.

-- Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven

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