[Python-Dev] folding cElementTree behind ElementTree in 3.3 (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Tue Feb 21 02:59:54 CET 2012

On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 11:39 AM, Eli Bendersky <eliben at gmail.com> wrote:

So the two choices here are either change the documentation or the C implementation to actually make Element a class. The first is of course simpler. However, someone somewhere may have written code that knowingly forces the Python implementation to be used and subclasses Element. Such code will break in 3.3, so it probably makes sense to invest in making Element a class in the C implementation as well.

Yeah, that's my take as well (especially since, in 3.2 and earlier, "forcing" use of the pure Python version was just a matter of importing ElementTree instead of cElementTree).

While Xavier's point about lxml following cElementTree's lead and using a factory function is an interesting one, I think in this case the documented behaviour + pure Python implementation win out over the C accelerator behaviour.

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia

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