On 9/23/05, Peter Hansen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > My point, which might not have been clear, is that users are *already* > told that they shouldn't ever touch __anything__ without understanding > what it is, which is more general advice than and therefore encompasses > the __builtins__ issue. For this reason I believe the existing advice > is sufficient for everyone except those who would probably also end up > ignoring your above suggestions anyway.
I'm not proposing a new rule on the level of "learn about __foo__ before you mess with it"; the delegation structure of that rule is sufficient. I do however want the docs for __builtins__ to explicitly mention a) that you should do your mucking with __builtin__ instead, and b) that __builtins__ is a module when in __main__ and a dict everywhere else; the current documentation makes no mention of either. Come morning I'll submit a patch for the reference manual. > > Maybe > > __builtins__ could be removed entirely from Py3.0, thus bringing > > reality in to sync with policy. > > That's a possibility, though given that it's an implementation detail > there could easily be other implementation details which you would then > be asking to be removed as well because they might confuse someone. If > you really want to avoid having implementation details exposed like > this, you should probably be participating closely in the development > process. ;-) I'm relatively new to the python-dev world, but I intend to do what I can to eliminate blemishes like __builtins__. Collin Winter -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
