At 11:08 AM 8/10/2005 -0700, Alec Flett wrote:
I feel like folks are leaning towards pje's python .update mechanism as the GUT of item declaration.. and I think that's a mistake and I think its because people feel burned by parcel.xml. Its the underlying API sure, but if we never HAD parcel.xml, I can guarantee you that I wouldn't be the first one to say ".update() is really tedious for the UI - lets find a simpler way to declare this stuff.. what about xml?"
Actually, from my experimental porting of snippets of views/main to Python code, it seems to me that the actual complexity is in CPIA's API.
I would imagine that if we were using Python to create items in the first place, the evolutionary pressure would've been towards providing simpler constructors or utility functions as part of the CPIA API, because those could be done by just writing new methods or functions, not by needing to change an XML format.
In other words, I'm suggesting that the verbosity of defining blocks in Python comes from CPIA-defined features, not from Python. The simplest way to improve this would be to enhance the CPIA API -- and not to define another data format. (Which doesn't make anything you still have to do in Python any easier.)
Also, certain features of CPIA (such as blockName vs. itsName) might be able to go away if we're not copying items -- or the constructors might be changed to set blockName=itsName. There are lots of possibilities for simplifying object creation and reducing redundancy that are available in Python, as Bryan has also pointed out.
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