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[Python-Dev] PEP 3147

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Sat Apr 10 18:39:00 CEST 2010 
Barry Warsaw wrote:
> I don't have strong feelings about this.  I thought it would be handy for
> future Python's to have access to this, but then, without access to previous
> version magic numbers, it probably doesn't help much.  And as you say, CPython
> won't know about alternative implementation's tags.
> 
> So I'm willing to call YAGNI on it and just expose the current Python's magic
> tag.  While we're at it, how about making both the tag and the number
> attributes of the imp module, instead of functions like .get_magic()?  Of
> course we'd keep the latter for backward compatibility.

I think one of the virtues of the functions is making it bleedingly
obvious to all concerned that these are read only values.

So +1 to only exposing the current version of the implementation tag and
magic number, and +0 to doing so via attributes rather than functions.

(I'm still in favour of keeping the list of old tags and magic numbers
in a source comment though - commenting them out rather than deleting
them when updating them isn't a major hassle).

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
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