[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>... > Since Python does not have declarations, I wonder if people think it is > good to name function arguments according to the type of data structure > expected, with names like "xlist" or "xdict".
Your suggestion coincides partly with a mechanism I developed recently for my libxml2dom package. The normal libxml2dom package puts a DOM-style wrapper around the existing Python wrapper objects - something that Python's dynamic features accomplish easily - but this incurs a major performance cost. Given that a low-level API (libxml2mod) exists and provides a means to exchange fairly simple and/or opaque objects with the library, I wondered if I couldn't just write a code transformer which takes DOM-like code and emits code to use the low-level API. For example: element.childNodes -> libxml2mod.children(element) The challenge, as you've noted with your mention of declarations, is to find out whether a particular name refers to an object of a suitable type for the kind of transformations I have in mind. (Alternatively, one could just guess that "childNodes" is a DOM-style attribute and do the transformation, possibly leading to mistaken transformations taking place.) Whilst type inference might offer a solution, it is itself a much bigger project than this, so my quick solution was to permit the annotation of names using prefixes to indicate which names refer to DOM-style objects. For example: # Special magic defined earlier says that x2_ is the chosen prefix. x2_element.childNodes -> libxml2mod.children(x2_element) The result of this is libxml2macro [1], an experimental interface to libxml2 which manages to retain much of the space/time performance of that library, albeit without addressing the divisive issues of transparent memory management. It also offers an insight into the "optional static typing" parallel universe for Python... Paul [1] http://www.boddie.org.uk/python/libxml2dom.html -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
