Re: regex into str

From: Diez B. Roggisch (deetsNOSPAM_at_web.de)
Date: 08/29/04 

Date: Sun, 29 Aug 2004 22:51:21 +0200

Hi,

> Programming causes bugs. That's not a reason to disallow programming.

Well, with that attitude I suggest you start coding in assembler - all
freedom you can imagine, no rules. Every bit is subject to your personal
interpretation. Or C, which is basically assembler with more names and
curly braces.

But for some reasons people started developing and using higher level
languages, that forbid certain techniques - and everytime somebody yelled
"I want to be free to do what I want" - python has its very special case of
that with its whitspace-dependend blocking structure that frequently causes
people confronted with it to reject python as language.

People started using higher level languages because they actually _did_
decrease the amount of problems programming caused - so the projects could
get more eleaborated.

Don't get me wrong - there is a lot of decisions to be made in language
design, and lots of them are debatable - python is no exception from that
rule. But as I said before - allowing builtins to be manipulated aks for
more trouble than its worth. Imagine a len() that always returns 1 - no
matter what you feed it. Or _if_ you're allowed to change builtin-types
constructors - then who is to decide which of the 5 different string
implementations in the various modules imported is the one to use?

The only thing you really need is a simple constructor for your undoubtly
interesting and useful string-derived class. Overloading "" as the string
constructor isn't possible - for the simple reason that only a statically
typed language could distinct the usage of the "classic" constructor vs.
your enhanced version.

So what you could do is to modify the builtins-_dict_ - that is possible -
to contain a new constructor s in it - then creating your strings is just

s('foo')

Which is only three chars more than usual string creation.

Another approach would be some macro-mechanism - but python doesn't have
such facility builtin - and I'm not aware that there is a widely adopted
3rd-party module/extenion out in the wild. 

-- 
Regards,
Diez B. Roggisch

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