[Types-sig] PyDL RFC 0.02

[Greg Stein]

On Mon, 27 Dec 1999, scott wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 27, 1999 at 12:54:54PM -0500, Paul Prescod wrote:
> > scott wrote:
> > > 
> > > One thing to consider is that windows/dos users can't have a 4-char
> > > suffix on a file name reliably.
> > 
> > Well, DOS users....Windows 9x/NT users will have no problem. I'm not
> > sure if I care enough about DOS to think that we should change this.

Windows 9x people can very well have problems. The underlying filesystem
is still 8.3. I continued to see issues with the name mapping between long
and short. Mostly, it appears with certain APIs and the registry.

Seriously: avoid more than .3 if possible.

>...
> > > I believe greg has a good point here.  
> > 
> > I think I've addressed it. The Python interpreter should not be looking
> > at each namespace in turn. I would expect that in the future we will
> > allow an infinite number of nested namespaces without any performance
> > penalty.
> 
> Perhaps, but when?  I haven't seen any indication that this will
> happen in the near future, and predicting such things in the longer
> run seems to be asking for problems both in the meantime and in how
> the long run might actually work out.

Yah. What he said.

"in the future" is a *long* ways off when there hasn't been any real 
discussion on if/how to deal with the multiple namespace issue. Relying on
a solution to appear is asking for trouble (IMO).

There are also a number of auxilliary things that would need to occur and
changes to programs to realize that more namespaces exist in the standard
lookup (a true partition of purpose would avoid this).

However: I'm still against adding a whole new namespace. I haven't seen a
good argument for why it is needed. Can somebody come up with a concise
rationale?

>...
> > > Any pointers to this discussion?
> > 
> > I don't have any. I think we just said: "we'll figure out const later."
> > There may not have been a big discussion.
> 
> Sounds good to me.

Hrm. I'll try to dig it up. I thought I remembered somebody saying "and
<that> is why const isn't really needed."

Happy Holidays,
-g

-- 
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/