Re: Re: Some questions/suggestions

[me]
>Good point!  The current behaviour assumes the programmer knows full
>well what he's doing.  It should probably raise an exception instead,
>but that raises backwards incompatibility issues.  Hmmm.

[[email protected]]
> Maybe I'm naive, but I don't see anyone sane accessing invalid identifiers 
> using the __dict__. The '-' to '_' conversion should stay, docutils seems 
> to use it. I agree an exception should be raised. 

Err, I should have said, "... raises the possibility of backwards
incompatibility issues for users who really like to push the
boundaries".

However, you don't need to grub about in __dict__ to get odd-named
attributes -- you can use getattr() and setattr().

Also, a truly strict check would not just ban "--foo!bar", it would also
ban "--3-times", because Python identifiers cannot start with a digit.
Combine that with the fact hat

  getattr(options, '3_times')

isn't *that* ugly, and you can see my point.

> >Good point.  Again, I'd have to look hard and think hard before I could
> >answer this one properly. 
> >
> >Can you enumerate the problems you see with the current design? 
> >
> 
> I'm not sure what you're asking for here. Are you referring to my 'I can 
> see some problems with the current implementation'? 

Yes, that's exactly what I was curious about.  It's like you said you
had a proof for this theorem but didn't have room to write it in the
margin.  ;-)

        Greg
-- 
Greg Ward <[email protected]>                         http://www.gerg.ca/
Gee, I feel kind of LIGHT in the head now, knowing I can't make my
satellite dish PAYMENTS!


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