Rationale behind the deprecation of __getslice__?

[Fernando Perez]

Hi all,

I was wondering if someone can help me understand why __getslice__ has been
deprecated, yet it remains necessary to implement it for simple slices (i:j),
while __getitem__ gets called for extended slices (i:j:k).  

The problem with this approach, besides a bit of code duplication, is that
classes which implement slicing must now do runtime type-checking inside
__getitem__.  Here's a trivial example:


################################################################
import types

class Vector(list):
    def __init__(self,arg,wrap=0):
        '''
        If arg is an integer, make a new zero vector of length n.
        Otherwise, arg must be a python sequence or another vector,
        and a new (deep) copy is generated.
        '''
        if isinstance(arg,int):
            list.__init__(self,[0.0]*arg)
        else:
            list.__init__(self,arg)

    def __getitem__(self,key):
        """called for single-element OR slice access"""
        if type(key) is types.SliceType:
            return Vector(list.__getitem__(self,key))
        else:
            return list.__getitem__(self,key)

    def __getslice__(self,i,j):
        """Deprecated since 2.0, but still called for non-extended slices.

        Since extended slices are handled by __getitem__, I'm just deferring
        to that one so all actual implementation is done there.  Why this is
        not the default (since they deprecated __getslice__) is beyond me."""
        
        return self.__getitem__(slice(i,j))

print 'a is a vector'
a = Vector(5)
print a
print type(a)
print

print 'b is a slice of a'
b = a[1:3]
print b
print type(b)
print

print 'c is an element of a'
c = a[1]
print c
print type(c)

################################################################

What bugs me is that typecheck for slicing which seems to be necessary inside
of the __getitem__ method.  I have the feeling that the code would be much
cleaner if I could simply use __getslice__ for slices and __getitem__ for
items, and that bundling the two in this hybrid mode is reall ugly and
unpythonic.  Am I just missing something?

Thanks for any help,

f