[Python-Dev] PEP 443 - Single-dispatch generic functions (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Fri May 24 05:57:38 CEST 2013

On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 10:31 AM, PJ Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:

On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 6:58 PM, Ben Hoyt <benhoyt at gmail.com> wrote:

It seems no one has provided decent use-case examples (apart from contrived ones) Um, copy.copy(), pprint.pprint(), a bunch of functions in pkgutil which are actually based on this implementation already and have been since Python 2.5... I don't see how any of those are contrived examples. If we'd had this in already, all the registration-based functions for copying, pickling, etc. would likely have been implemented this way, and the motivating example for the PEP is the coming refactoring of pprint.pprint.

We should be able to use it to help deal with the "every growing importer API" problem, too. I know that's technically what pkgutil already uses it for, but elevating this from "pkgutil implementation detail" to "official stdlib functionality" should make it easier to document properly :)

Cheers, Nick.

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

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