On Wednesday, Feb 5, 2003, at 10:52 US/Eastern, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> In my experience almost no Python code depends on this property, and
> it seems to be the most problematic one. So why is this a
> requirement?
Because we are using Python to glue together other object oriented
frameworks-- Apple's and third party's-- for which we do not have
control over said behavior.
Sometimes an object is just an object and those frameworks insist on
the same object-- same identifier/address-- coming out that went in.
As Just pointed out, my original example wasn't as clear as it could
have been. If a String object comes out of the alien-to-python world
and is later sent from python back into the alien-to-python runtime,
the same String object-- the same id()-- must be sent back.
> If you can live with only using Unicode strings (even when all they
> contain is ASCII or Latin-1 values), I think subclassing Unicode might
> be the way to go.
Right. I believe that is the path will we go down.
> I don't have time to dig deeper into this. But if you think a small
> change to Python can make life easier for you, I expect we'll be happy
> to implement it, as long as it doesn't make life harder for Python
> developers.
I can think of a couple of changes to Python that would be potentially
quite helpful in this situation.
Specifically:
- ability to have weak references to string objects [and unicode
objects]. Since we can make arbitrary object associations and
re-associations when crossing the bridge between environments, I
believe weakref would allow us to maintain a reference map as long as
we could grab the 'string is now going away' callback to update the
weakref map when the string is deallocated
- ability to subclass string objects or the ability to add a hunk
of data-- the reference to the 'alien' string object-- to any string
object.
Either one would work equally as well... whether or not they are easy
to do, I have not a clue.
b.bum
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