Nick Coghlan <ncogh...@gmail.com> added the comment: The difference here is the one pointed out in the original post: for a function, you usually only care about having a value, so if you don't want to call it, you can just swap in a None value instead. If you need an actual callable, then "lambda:None" fits the bill.
The with statement isn't quite so forgiving. You need a genuine context manager in order to preserve the correct structure in the calling code. It isn't intuitively obvious how to do that easily. While not every 3-line function needs to be in the standard library, sometimes they're worth including to aid discoverability as much as anything else. However, I don't see the point in making it a singleton and the name should include the word "context" so it doesn't becoming ambiguous when referenced without the module name (there's a reason we went with contextlib.contextmanager over contextlib.manager). Something like: class nullcontext(): """No-op context manager, executes block without doing any additional processing. Used as a standin if a particular block of code is only sometimes used with a normal context manager: with optional_cm or nullcontext(): # Perform operation, using the specified CM if one is given """ def __enter__(): pass def __exit__(*exc_info): pass ---------- _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue10049> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com