[Python-3000] About "daemon" in threading module

[Jesus Cea]

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Nick Coghlan wrote:
> Guido van Rossum wrote:
>> On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 8:47 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
>>> Jesus Cea <jcea <at> jcea.es> writes:
>>>> First we had "thread.setDaemon()". This was not PEP8, so Python 3.0
>>>> renamed it to "thread.set_daemon()". Lately Python 3.0 changes the
>>>> method to an attribute "thread.daemon".
>>>>
>>>> I think the last change is risky, because you can mistype and create a
>>>> new attribute, instead of set daemon mode. Since daemon mode is only
>>>> usually visible when things goes wrong (the main thread dies), you can
>>>> miss the bug for a long time.
>>> I've never understood why the "daemon" flag couldn't be passed as one of the
>>> constructor arguments. It would make code shorter, and avoid the mistyping risk
>>> mentioned by Jesus. It also sounds saner, since you shouldn't change the flag
>>> after the thread is started anyway.
>> As to the why question, this was done to match the Java Thread class.
>> I don't want to speculate why the Java API was designed this way --
>> possibly it was a relic of an earlier API version in Java, but
>> possibly there's a reason I can't fathom right now. After all, there
>> are excellent reasons why start() is a separate call...
> 
> Hmm, having (daemon=False) as a parameter on start() would probably be
> an even better API than having it on __init__() (modulo subclassing
> compatibility concerns).

Agreed. Could it be done for 3.0?.

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