[Python-Dev] PEP 3144 review.

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Antoine Pitrou writes:

 > There was a proposal to have a separate parse_address_and_mask
 > method which would return a (Address, Network) tuple, I still don't
 > know why you don't seem to consider it seriously, rather than
 > trying to make the Network class a kind of all-in-one type
 > conflating different concepts.

Because he thinks about the problem space differently from you.
Specifically, AFAICS he does not (maybe even "can't") see a reason to
distinguish an AddressWithMask from a Network.  If so, it's a
reasonable API choice for him to choose not to have separate classes
to represent such similar concepts.  That's all there is to it.

I personally do not have a problem with that, except that you
apparently can't grasp his way of thinking, and he apparently can't
grasp yours.  I'm -1 on PEP 3144 primarily because of this
communications gap.

Secondarily because I agree that it's unnatural that a Network
instance can have an arbitrary distinguished address other than those
defined in the RFCs (the network and broadcast addresses), especially
since it matters to equality comparisons.  (But I personally would use
ipaddr if it were in the stdlib despite that.)