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[Python-ideas] Anonymous namedtuples

Eric Snow ericsnowcurrently at gmail.com
Tue Apr 19 20:26:42 EDT 2016 
On Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 8:39 AM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> Having done some digging just now... SimpleNamespace is basically just
> exposing for end users, the type that is used to build the
> sys.implementation object. The definition is *literally* nothing more
> than
>
>     SimpleNamespace = type(sys.implementation)

FYI, sys.implementation was added for PEP 421 (May-ish 2012).  That
PEP has a small section on the type I used. [1]  At first it was
unclear if I should even expose type(sys.implementation). [2]  Nick
suggested types.SimpleNamespace, so I went with that. [3] :)

Note that the type is super simple/trivial, a basic subclass of object
with a **kwargs __init__() to pre-populate and a nice repr.  Both that
first link [1] and the docs [4] spell it out.  The point is that there
isn't much to the type.  It's a convenience, nothing else.  I used to
get roughly the same thing with "class SimpleNamespace: pass". :)

FWIW, I proposed giving SimpleNamespace more exposure around the same
time as PEP 421, and the reaction was lukewarm. [5]  However, since
then it's been used in several other places in the stdlib and I know
of a few folks that have used it in their own projects.  Regardless,
ultimately the only reason I added it to the stdlib in the first place
[6] was because it's the type of sys.implementation and it made more
sense to expose it explicitly in the types module than implicitly via
type(sys.implementation).

-eric

[1] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0421/#type-considerations
[2] https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2012-May/119771.html
[3] https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2012-May/119775.html
[4] https://docs.python.org/3/library/types.html#types.SimpleNamespace
[5] https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2012-May/015208.html
[6] in contrast to argparse.Namespace and multiprocessing.managers.Namespace...
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