Mailing List Archive

Inspiration
Re: Inspiration [ In reply to ]
On Fri, 21 Apr 2000, Guido van Rossum wrote:

> http://www.perl.com/pub/2000/04/whatsnew.html

Yeah, loads of cool stuff we should steal...
And loads of stuff that we shouldn't steal, no matter how cool
it looks (lvaluable subroutines, anyone?)

--
Moshe Zadka <mzadka@geocities.com>.
http://www.oreilly.com/news/prescod_0300.html
http://www.linux.org.il -- we put the penguin in .com
Re: Inspiration [ In reply to ]
On Fri, 21 Apr 2000, Guido van Rossum wrote:

> http://www.perl.com/pub/2000/04/whatsnew.html

OK, here's my summary of the good things we should copy:

(In that order:)

-- Weak references (as weak dictionaries? would "w{}" to signify a weak
dictionary is alright parser-wise?)
-- Binary numbers -- way way cool (and doesn't seem to hard -- need to
patch the tokenizer, PyLong_FromString and PyOS_strtoul: anything
I've missed?)

--
Moshe Zadka <mzadka@geocities.com>.
http://www.oreilly.com/news/prescod_0300.html
http://www.linux.org.il -- we put the penguin in .com
Re: Inspiration [ In reply to ]
On Sat, 22 Apr 2000, Moshe Zadka wrote:
> On Fri, 21 Apr 2000, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> > http://www.perl.com/pub/2000/04/whatsnew.html
>
> OK, here's my summary of the good things we should copy:
>
> (In that order:)
>
> -- Weak references (as weak dictionaries? would "w{}" to signify a weak
> dictionary is alright parser-wise?)
> -- Binary numbers -- way way cool (and doesn't seem to hard -- need to
> patch the tokenizer, PyLong_FromString and PyOS_strtoul: anything
> I've missed?)

Yet another numeric format? eek. If anything, we should be dropping octal,
rather than adding binary.

You want binary? Just use int("10010", 2). No need for more syntax.

I'd go for weak objects (proxies) rather than weak dictionaries.
Duplicating the dict type just to deal with weak refs seems a bit much.
But I'm not a big brain on this stuff -- I tend to skip all the
discussions people have had on this stuff. I just avoid the need for
circular refs and weak refs :-)

Most of the need for weak refs would disappear with some simple form of GC
installed. And it seems we'll have that by 1.7.

Cheers,
-g

--
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/
Re: Inspiration [ In reply to ]
On Sat, 22 Apr 2000, Greg Stein wrote:

> Yet another numeric format? eek. If anything, we should be dropping octal,
> rather than adding binary.
>
> You want binary? Just use int("10010", 2). No need for more syntax.

Damn, but you're right.

> Most of the need for weak refs would disappear with some simple form of GC
> installed. And it seems we'll have that by 1.7.

Disagree. Think "destructors": with weak references, there's no problems:
the referant dies first, and if later, the referer needs the referant
to die, well, he'll get a "DeletionError: this object does not exist
anymore" in his face, which is alright, because a weak referant should
not trust the reference to live.

90%-of-the-cyclic-__del__-full-trash-problem-would-go-away-ly y'rs, Z.
--
Moshe Zadka <mzadka@geocities.com>.
http://www.oreilly.com/news/prescod_0300.html
http://www.linux.org.il -- we put the penguin in .com