What's in a name?

[Edward S. Vinyard]

Ouch!  Your questions might be the death knell for my suggestions. For
example, I can legally write:
  
class f:
    value = 1

def f():
    return 2

f = 3

Perhaps I was thinking too "statically-typed".  Thanks for the specific
questions.  Some of these didn't occur to me, and they've got me thinking
about more practical matters.

Ed

On Thu, 25 May 2000, Andrew Dalke wrote:
>Edward S. Vinyard wrote:
>>For example, forcing the first letter of class names to be capitalized
>>makes it visually clear which names are classes.  I enjoy Python's lack of
>>block delimiters and I think I would enjoy the lack of implicitness here,
>>too.
>
>Will the following be allowed?
>
>import UserList
>x = UserList.UserList
>
>or will all assignment have to preserve case?
>
>What about:
>
>def f():
>  return UserList.UserList
>x = f()
>
>or will f() have to be capitalized if it returns classes, thus making
>x by capitalized because it gets something from F()?
>
>Sometimes you use factory functions instead of a constructor.  Consider
>the following common idiom:
>
>try:
>  from cStringIO import StringIO  # function
>except ImportError:
>  from StringIO import StringIO   # constructor
>
>f = StringIO("This is some text")
>
>Would you prevent the first from occuring?  Similarly, any sort of
>dispatch function will likely need to allow both functions and constructors
>to be used interchangeably:
>
>table = {
>  "i", int,
>  "sf", StringIO,
>  ...
>}
>def unpack_object(s):
>  datatype, data = string.split(s)
>  f = table.get(datatype, None)
>  if f is None:
>    raise TypeError("unknown datatype", datatype)
>  return f(data)
>
>                    Andrew
>                    dalke at acm.org
>
>
>
>
>