Hello Folks! In my quest to uncover the many asininities contained within the tkSimpleDialog.py module i found myself contemplating some the very fundamental aspects of the Python language proper. And this is aspect be... "Pythonic notation".
But before i introduce you to my latest discovery of collective ineptitude i want to discuss some of the great pythonic notations we already enjoy. In the beginning, Mr. Van Rossum (in a stroke of complete brilliance i might add!) stumbled upon the idea of syntactical notation and he seized upon it! We all know how python uses indention to denote scopes (and i just love this aspect about the language!) but my next favorite notation is the leading and trailing double underscores that wrap special method names[1] Because they just JUMP out at you whilst reading code (and they should!). Even if they only say... """Hey, i am special and you should only care about me if you are an experienced pythonista, otherwise nothing to see here, move along lad!""" Actually i did not realize just HOW important this notation was to my code comprehension until i started tinkering with another language called "Ruby" (who BTW does not use any notation for this matter). Ruby doesn't use any special notation so all the member methods just blend into the crowd. Nothing jumps out and says "HEY, I'M SPECIAL, LOOK AT ME"... instead you start to get sea sick from the homogeneous structure of it all. You cannot quickly categorize the method hierarchy without extensive reading and wasted time. This is a shame! But this gushing over underscores is not the subject of my thread today, what concerns me is the fact that virtual methods in derived classes just blend in to the crowd. For me this presents major problem, because i don't know what "behind the scenes" actions are going to take place without a very personal relationship with the underlying code base. More wasted time! So what i am proposing is some way to differentiate methods that have been clobbered by the derived class. And it's not the fact that they have been clobbered that is of any concern to me, NO, what concerns me is that i don't know what "invisible" side effects are taking place "behind-the-scenes", much less which methods are the root of such invisible side effects. You know as Pyhthonista's we always frown on syntactic decorators HOWEVER like all good things these visual cues are best taken when in moderation. I believe in these cases syntactic decorators are not only needed but they are warranted! Of course the simplest solution is a doc string explaining the case to a reader. But as we all know even pyhtonista's refuse to follow the style guide so this will be a non starter. I think we really need some sort of visual cue in the form of forced syntactical notation (just like the special method underscores). [1] http://docs.python.org/reference/datamodel.html#special-method-names -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
