On 1/2/07, Phillip J. Eby <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > At 05:48 PM 1/2/2007 -0600, Collin Winter wrote: > >Is whatever savings you see there worth changing the language for? Is > >function overloading really that important and that common? > > Ah, but now you're making a different argument. Your original statement > was that "we're getting along without annotations quite nicely"; my > response was merely to refute that point. There do indeed exist use cases > that are better off with annotation than without.
The argument I was trying (and perhaps failing) to make is that it seems like the language is being changed to make life easier for some pretty obscure and relatively rare use-cases, even if those cases are taken together. (Rearranging a bit) > Now, if you want to pick at each and every one of these use cases and > assert that the one use case, *by itself*, doesn't justify the feature, > well, you may be right. But as with decorators, that doesn't necessarily > mean the feature itself is wrong! Decorators are an excellent example of a > feature that meets many use cases, few if any of which would be sufficient > in themselves to justify a language change. > For example, interfacing to at least Java and Objective C have also been > mentioned as use cases, and I can think of a variety of other uses such as > database query mapping, predicate logic functions, and web or other types > of RPC parameter marshalling. I don't see annotations and decorators as falling in to the same category in that respect. Decorators make life easier for a much wider audience than do annotations. Everyone uses decorators, but how many people write/use Java/ObjC bridges? Predicate logic functions? RPC parameter marshaling? Decorators took something that everyone was already doing and made it easier. Taken together, the corpus of annotations use-cases still represents a fairly rarefied subset of Python usage. Maybe I'm wrong, though. A serious question to anyone doing a lot of, e.g., RPC work: will annotations make your life easier? In what way? Thanks, Collin Winter PS: I think it's interesting how nearly all the use-cases mentioned involve adding type information to functions. _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
