Inquiry regarding the name of subprocess.Popen class

[Derek Martin]

On Tue, Sep 02, 2008 at 12:27:49PM +0000, Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch wrote:
> > The Python class is a generalization of the standard Posix function of
> > (almost) the same name:
> > http://opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908775/xsh/popen.html
> 
> So it's a name of a *function* and it's a little bit unsuitable for a 
> *class*.  As Jeremy wrote: the instances represent *processes* not 
> "popen"s, whatever that may be.

I would argue that they don't represent processes at all; the object
is a set of files which connect the standard I/O streams of a
subprocess to its parent, and methods to operate on those files.  The
C library's popen() function, on which this class is based, provides a
means to open a file and connect it to the standard steams of a
subprocess, making it more closely analogous to what the Popen class
does/provides.  As such, "Popen" is a better name to describe this
object than "subprocess" would be.  

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D

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