[Python-Dev] Re: anonymous blocks

[Brett C.]

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