On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 7:14 AM, Eli Bendersky <eli...@gmail.com> wrote: > I'm just curious what it is about enums that sets everyone on a "let's make > things safer" path. Python is about duck typing, it's absolutely "unsafe" in > the static typing sense, in the most fundamental ways imaginable. When > programmatically invoking a method on a class (say some sort of RPC), we > don't check that the class is of the correct type. We invoke a method, and > if it quacks, that's a good enough duck. If it was actually the wrong class, > something will break later. EAFP Is a central Python tenet, whether we like > it or not. If one looks for static guarantees, Python surely shouldn't be > the preferred language, no? > > And concretely, how is this case different from any programmatic attribute > access in Python objects? You can pass dunders to getattr() and it probably > wasn't what you meant, but Python does not do this type checking for you. > Why is an Enum different than any other class?
Let's make that a topic for a separate, more philosophical thread, python-ideas. Back to this particular issue, I haven't seen code in the style that Greg proposes in decades, and I don't think it is an important enough use case to support more directly than through getattr() + isinstance(). -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido) _______________________________________________ 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
