[Python-Dev] PEP 487: Simpler customization of class creation

[Nick Coghlan]

On 21 June 2016 at 10:18, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 21, 2016 at 10:12 AM, Eric Snow <ericsnowcurrently at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Jun 20, 2016 at 12:31 PM, Nikita Nemkin <nikita at nemkin.ru> wrote:
>> > Right. Ordered by default is a very serious implementation constraint.
>> > It's only superior in a sense that it completely subsumes/obsoletes
>> > PEP 520.
>>
>> Just to be clear, PEP 520 is more than just OrderedDict-by-default.
>> In fact, the key point is preserving the definition order, which the
>> PEP now reflects better.  Raymond's compact dict would only provide
>> the ordered-by-default part and does nothing to persist the definition
>> order like the PEP specifies.
>
>
> Judging from Inada's message there seems to be some confusion about how well
> the compact dict preserves order (personally I think if it doesn't guarantee
> order after deletions it's pretty useless).
>
> Assuming it preserves order across deletions/compactions (like IIUC
> OrderedDict does) isn't that good enough for any of the use cases
> considered? It would require a delete+insert to change an item's order. If
> we had had these semantics in the language from the start, there would have
> been plenty uses of this order, and I suspect nobody would have considered
> asking for __definition_order__.

RIght, if *tp_dict itself* on type objects is guaranteed to be
order-preserviing, then we don't need to do anything except perhaps
provide a helper method or descriptor on type that automatically
filters out the dunder-attributes, and spell out the type dict
population order for:

- class statements (universal)
- types.new_class (universal)
- calling type() directly (universal)
- PyType_Ready (CPython-specific)
- PyType_FromSpec (CPython-specific)

Something that isn't currently defined in PEP 520, and probably should
be regardless of whether the final implementation is an order
preserving tp_dict or a new __definition_order__ attribute, is where
descriptors implicitly defined via __slots__ will appear relative to
other attributes.

Regards,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia