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

Ethan Furman ethan at stoneleaf.us
Sat May 4 15:37:23 CEST 2013

On 05/04/2013 04:33 AM, Antoine Pitrou wrote:

On Sat, 4 May 2013 16:42:08 +1000 Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

On Sat, May 4, 2013 at 4:10 PM, Georg Brandl <g.brandl at gmx.net> wrote:

Am 04.05.2013 01:22, schrieb Antoine Pitrou:

On Sat, 04 May 2013 11:15:17 +1200 Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:

Eli Bendersky wrote:

I'm just curious what it is about enums that sets everyone on a "let's make things safer" path. Python is about duck typing, it's absolutely "unsafe" in the static typing sense, in the most fundamental ways imaginable.

This isn't about catching bugs in the program, it's about validating user input. That's a common enough task that it deserves to have a convenient way to do it correctly. +1. An enum is basically a bidirectional mapping between some raw values and some "nice" instances, so it deserves a well-defined lookup operation in each direction. As I see it, there are 3 possible ways forward here: 4. Offer classmethods named Enum.byname() and Enum.byvalue(). Simple and explicit.

And then you can't have enum items named by_name and by_value.

-- Ethan

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