FEEDBACK WANTED: Type/class unification

[James_Althoff at i2.com]

I've been playing around with the new type/class stuff and (so far) think
it is great!  In particular the classmethod and staticmethod mechanisms
seem to work very nicely.  It looks to me like I can use the classmethod
mechanism to do all the same kinds of things that I used to do with
metaclass methods in Smalltalk!  :-)

(Subclassing of builtin types seems to work nicely, too!)

One question: since class methods have a class object as the designated
first argument, should there be a convention for naming this argument
(similar to using "self" as the convention for standard instance methods)
to enhance readability?  Perhaps "myclass" or "selfclass" or something
similar?  Any thoughts?

Great job!!!

Jim


>>>>>>>>>>>>
Guido wrote:
When I released Python 2.2a1, the type/class unification feature was
announced as TENTATIVE.  It's been a while now (feels like a year,
although I realize it's only been 10 days :), and I would like to see
some feedback on this.

If there's anyone who believes the type/class unification should not
become a feature in Python 2.2, please speak up now or forever hold
your peace...  (But I'd rather you speak up!)

Note that if you have concerns about backwards incompatibilities, the
best thing you can do is point them out ASAP.  I want to ensure that
2.2 (final) is as compatible with 2.1 as possible, while still
providing the new exciting features that type/class unification makes
possible.

I realize the PEPs aren't done yet, but I believe that the separate
introduction I wrote goes a long way towards explaining type/class
unification.  Read it here:

  http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html

Any questions, don't hesitate to ask.  Just DON'T CHANGE THE THREAD
TOPIC.  I don't have time to read the entire newsgroup (I tried this
week, and I didn't get to anything else :).

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
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