[Python-ideas] non-Pre-PEP: Syntactic replacement of built-in types with user-defined callables (Take 2... fewer newlines!)

[Taro]

Talin, hi

On Jan 29, 2008 2:44 PM, Talin <talin at acm.org> wrote:
> The problem I see with this is, what if you need to use both decimals
> and floats together?
If you need decimals and floats together, then you'd need to pick one
and convert the other, eg:
    from decimal typedef Decimal as float
    ofloat = __builtins__.float
    mydecimals = [1.00000000000000000000001, ..., 99.000000000000000009]
    myfloat = ofloat("3.14")

If for some reason you need exactly even quantities of decimals and
floats then at least you're no worse off than you are now -- just
don't typedef.

> And if you really are suffering repetitive strain injury from having to
> type 'OrderedDict' 100 times in your code, it seems to me that you could
> just avoid creating each one individually, and instead have an array of
> inputs which gets converted to an array of OrderedDict. In other words,
> one generally doesn't see code where the same repeated item is assigned
> to 100 individual variables; Most programmers, when they see more than
> half a dozen similar items, will start thinking about ways in which they
> can roll up the definitions into an algorithm to generate them.
But it gets back to the prettiness* factor - it's prettier to read a
mapping of keys to values that's written like a dict than it is to
read a list of 2-tuples, and at least some of the time it's much nicer
to have such a mapping in the sourcefile than converting a datafile.

-T.
(*eye of the beholder blah blah blah ;-)