[Python-Dev] enum discussion: can someone please summarize open issues? (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Mon Apr 29 04:10:04 CEST 2013

Steven D'Aprano writes:

  • should an enum item be selectable via call instead of getitem (i.e. Seasons(3) is AUTUMN)

No opinion.

Does anyone know why this is even an issue? Is this pure bike-shedding over the API, or are there technical reasons for choosing one over the other?

Ethan thinks that "Seasons(3)" is a typecast, not an access into a mapping (which would be better expressed by "Seasons[3]"). Ie, the inverse of "int(AUTUMN)".

This is consistent with the "AUTUMN is-a Seasons" position that Ethan and Guido take. It's inconsistent with the "AUTUMN is-a Seasons_VALUE" implementation of Flufl.Enum.

@Ethan: I have real trouble sympathizing with your point of view because you consistently pluralize your Enum names. AUTUMN is not a SeasonZZ, it is an element of the collection Seasons. OTOH, AUTUMN is a Season (look Ma, no ZZ!) I wonder if you might not get more sympathy from Guido if you named your Enums with the singular form.

Note that for some reason I don't have the same problem if Barry names an Enum "Season" (no ZZ!) I don't know why, maybe because the semantics of type is to define a collection (which in English is invariably denoted by the plural of the type name), so there's implicitly a plural there. But I'm not confident in that psychoanalysis.

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