Greg Ewing wrote: > Brett C. wrote: > >> And before anyone decries the fact that this might confuse a newbie >> (which >> seems to happen with every advanced feature ever dreamed up), remember >> this >> will not be meant for a newbie but for someone who has experience in >> Python and >> iterators at the minimum, and hopefully with generators. > > > This is dangerously close to the "you don't need to know about > it if you're not going to use it" argument, which is widely > recognised as false. Newbies might not need to know all the > details of the implementation, but they will need to know > enough about the semantics of with-statements to understand > what they're doing when they come across them in other people's > code. >
I am not saying it is totally to be ignored by people staring at Python code, but we don't need to necessarily spell out the intricacies. > Which leads me to another concern. How are we going to explain > the externally visible semantics of a with-statement in a way > that's easy to grok, without mentioning any details of the > implementation? > > You can explain a for-loop pretty well by saying something like > "It executes the body once for each item from the sequence", > without having to mention anything about iterators, generators, > next() methods, etc. etc. How the items are produced is completely > irrelevant to the concept of the for-loop. > > But what is the equivalent level of description of the > with-statement going to say? > > "It executes the body with... ???" > It executes the body, calling next() on the argument name on each time through until the iteration stops. > And a related question: What are we going to call the functions > designed for with-statements, and the objects they return? > Calling them generators and iterators (even though they are) > doesn't seem right, because they're being used for a purpose > very different from generating and iterating. > I like "managers" since they are basically managing resources most of the time for the user. -Brett _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
