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

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Tue Feb 21 23:06:22 CET 2012

On Tue, 21 Feb 2012 12:41:17 +0200 Eli Bendersky <eliben at gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 03:59, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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). > > I can't fathom why someone would do it though, since bar tiny differences (like this one) cET is just a faster ET and it's available practically everywhere with CPython. I mean, is it really important to be able to subclass ET.Element? What goal does it serve?

It probably wouldn't be very difficult to make element_new() the tp_new of Element_Type, and expose that type as "Element". That would settle the issue nicely and avoid compatibility concerns :)

Regards

Antoine.

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