[Python-ideas] Method chaining notation

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Feb 24, 2014 at 5:49 PM, Andrew Barnert <abarnert at yahoo.com> wrote:
> But remember that there is an advantage to Gtk, Qt, etc. having their own language-agnostic idioms. They have a hard enough time documenting the whole thing as it is; if they had to write completely different documentation for C, C++, Vala, Python, .NET, etc., we just wouldn't get any documentation.
>

Point to note: When I'm trying to pin down an issue that relates to
GTK on Windows, I'll sometimes switch between Pike and Python, since
my installations of them embed different GTK versions. (I discovered a
GTK bug that way.) Being able to translate my code from one language
to another is extremely useful. And when I'm looking for docs and
(especially) examples, it's really common to get them for some
completely different language - it's easier to translate back from
(say) Perl than to hunt down an example in the language I'm actually
using.

A more Pythonic wrapper around object creation would pretty much look
like what I was saying, except that it would take specific coding
work. Actually, probably all it'd take is a module that imports all
the PyGTK classes and wraps them in Steven's chain() function. But the
proposal I make here would put the power directly in the hands of the
programmer, rather than requiring that the module support it. Why
should method chaining be in the hands of the module author?

ChrisA