[Python-3000] ABC's, Roles, etc

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 09:06 AM 5/10/2007 -0400, Benji York wrote:
>I would let Jim speak for himself too, but I prefer to put words in his
>mouth. ;)  While zope.interface has anemic facilities for "verifying"
>interfaces, few people use them, and even then rarely outside of very
>simple "does this object look right" when testing.  It may have been
>believed verification would be a great thing, but it's all but
>deprecated at this point.

Okay, but that's quite the opposite of what I understand Jeff to be 
saying in this thread, which is that not only is LBYL good, but that 
he does it all the time.


>>And thus, for all of the use cases you just described, the minimal 
>>PEP 3124 Interface implementation should do just fine, yes?
>
>Could be, especially if it allows for adaptation.

Yes, it does.  In fact, adaptation is pretty much all they're good 
for, except for specifying argument types:

http://python.org/dev/peps/pep-3124/#interfaces-and-adaptation
http://python.org/dev/peps/pep-3124/#interfaces-as-type-specifiers


>My main intent in piping up was
>dispelling the LBYL dispersions about zope.interface. ;)

Well, "back in the day", before PyProtocols was written, I discovered 
PEP 246 adaptation and began trying to convince Jim Fulton that 
adaptation beat the pants off of using if-then's to do "implements" 
testing.  His argument then, IIRC, was that interface verification 
was more important.  I then went off and wrote PyProtocols in large 
part (specifically the large documentation part!) to show him what 
could be done using adaptation as a core concept.


>If the PEP cooperates as well with zope.interface as you suggest, all
>will be good in the world.  Personally I'd prefer sufficient hooks be
>added to the language and these types of things (interfaces, adaptation,
>generic functions, etc.) be left to third parties (like yourself)
>instead of being canonicalized unnecessarily.

Well, as Nick Coghlan's already pointed out, the PEP is mostly about 
creating a standard set of hooks, so that each framework doesn't have 
to reinvent decorators and syntax.


>>Indeed, ABCs would work for those use cases too, if you didn't need 
>>adaptation.  Or am I missing something?
>
>The main advantage I see to zope.interface is adaptation.  Other 
>than that, the fact that the inheritance and interface hierarchies 
>aren't mixed.

In which case, you might well be happy with PEP 3124 interfaces, 
unless you want to use instance-specific interfaces a lot.


>I would turn the argument around and assert that interfaces can be used
>for the rare LBYL uses that ABCs appear to be aimed at, as well as more
>interesting things.

Sure, which is another reason why PEP 3124 includes them.