[Python-Dev] Breaking undocumented API

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Alexander Belopolsky wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 1:57 PM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
> ..
>>> Note that we can have both a macro and a function
>>> version.  This is fairly standard practice in Python C-API.
>>
>> Sure, but what for ?
>>
> 
> Mostly just for consistency with the other macros:
> 
> http://docs.python.org/dev/py3k/c-api/unicode.html#unicode-character-properties
> 
> Wait, these actually map to C functions as well.  So this is just a
> naming issue.

As said: the UCS2/4 name mangling doesn't count fall under the
macro naming scheme, since it's done transparently and with a
different reasoning in mind, than when you decide to use a macro
to access some object detail, or want to avoid repetition. This
trick was also added after the original APIs had already been documented
for a while, so there was no way to change their names anymore.

The various ctype functions use macro names for historic
reasons: they were directed to different functions and/or
inline code depending on a configuration switch. This is now
gone, since the lib C ctype functions were locale aware and
often implemented things a little differently than the Python
ctype tables.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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