On Mon, 08 Jun 2009 18:30:37 +1000, Ben Finney wrote: > Steven D'Aprano <st...@remove-this-cybersource.com.au> writes: > >> On Sun, 07 Jun 2009 16:46:23 -0700, Raymond Hettinger wrote: >> >> > We factor code to eliminate redundancy, but that is not always a good >> > idea with an API. The goal for code factoring is to minimize >> > redundancy. The goal for API design is having simple parts that are >> > easily learned and can be readily combined (i.e. the notion of an >> > iterator algebra). >> >> Wonderfully said! That has articulated something which I only recently >> came to appreciate, but couldn't put into words. > > As originally defined by Martin Fowler, re-factoring always means the > external behaviour is unchanged <URL:http://refactoring.com/>. > > So, there's no such thing as a re-factoring that changes the API. > Anything that changes an external attribute of the code is a different > kind of transformation, not a re-factoring.
Possibly a *factoring*, without the "re-", just like Raymond said. Also, keep in mind that when creating a new API, you have no existing API to re-factor. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
