[Python-ideas] Ordered storage of keyword arguments

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Antoine Pitrou wrote:
> On Fri, 29 Oct 2010 10:30:26 +0200
> "M.-A. Lemburg" <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
>> Greg Ewing wrote:
>>> M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
>>>> Python has always tried
>>>> to make the most common use case simple, so asking programmers to
>>>> use a meta-class to be able to access the order of definitions
>>>> in a class definition isn't exactly what the normal Python
>>>> programmer would expect.
>>>
>>> But needing to know the order of definitions in a class
>>> is a very uncommon thing to want to do in the first
>>> place.
>>
>> I've already pointed to a couple of existing use cases where the
>> authors had to play all sorts of tricks to access the order of
>> such definitions.
>>
>> Since Python programs are executed sequentially (within the resp.
>> scope) in the order given in the source file, it is quite natural
>> to expect this order to be accessible somehow.
>>
>> If it were easier to access this order, a lot of the extra magic
>> needed to map fixed order records to Python classes could go
>> away.
> 
> Interestingly, this order is already accessible on the code object used
> to build the class namespace:
> 
>>>> def f():
> ...   class C:
> ...     x = 5
> ...     def y(): pass
> ...     z = 6
> ... 
>>>> code = f.__code__.co_consts[1]
>>>> code.co_names
> ('__name__', '__module__', 'x', 'y', 'z')

Interesting indeed and I kind of expected that order to be
available somewhere via the compiler.

Can this be generalized to arbitrary classes ?

Would other Python implementations be able to provide the
same information ?

If so, we could add this order as .__deforder__ tuple to class
objects.

Thanks,
-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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