[Python-Dev] Things to Know About Super (original) (raw)

Michele Simionato michele.simionato at gmail.com
Thu Aug 28 17:50:29 CEST 2008

On Aug 28, 5:30 pm, "Phillip J. Eby" <p... at telecommunity.com> wrote:

How is that making things easier for application programmers?

We have different definitions of "application programmer". For me a typical application programmer is somebody who never fiddles with metaclasses, which are the realm of framework builders. But the borders are fluid, I agree.

>Maybe you would need to duplicate a couple of lines and/or to introduce >an helper function,

...which then has to have an agreed-upon protocol that all metaclass authors have to follow... which we already have... but which you're proposing to get rid of... so we can re-invent it lots of times... in mutually incompatible ways. :)

Notice that I was discussing an hypothetical language. I was arguing that in principle one could write a different language from Python, with single inheritance only, and not lose much expressivity. I am not advocating any change to current Python. My point was in language design: I want to know how much I can remove from a language and still have something useful, in the spirit of the famous Saint-Exupery quote.

Michele Simionato

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