Mailman 3 September 2021 - Python-Dev

Mixed Python/C debugging
by Skip Montanaro April 26, 2023

April 26, 2023

Having tried comp.lang.python with no response, I turn here... After at least ten years away from Python's run-time interpreter & byte code compiler, I'm getting set to familiarize myself with that again. This will, I think, entail debugging a mixed Python/C environment. I'm an Emacs user and am aware that GDB since 7.0 has support for debugging at the Python code level. Is Emacs+GDB my best bet? Are there any Python IDEs which support C-level breakpoints and debugging? Thanks, Skip

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PEP 448 review
by Guido van Rossum March 29, 2023

March 29, 2023

I'm back, I've re-read the PEP, and I've re-read the long thread with "(no subject)". I think Georg Brandl nailed it: """ *I like the "sequence and dict flattening" part of the PEP, mostly because itis consistent and should be easy to understand, but the comprehension syntaxenhancements seem to be bad for readability and "comprehending" what the codedoes.The call syntax part is a mixed bag on the one hand it is nice to be consistent with the extended possibilities in literals (flattening), but on the other hand there would be small but annoying inconsistencies anyways (e.g. the duplicate kwarg case above).* """ Greg Ewing followed up explaining that the inconsistency between dict flattening and call syntax is inherent in the pre-existing different rules for dicts vs. keyword args: {'a':1, 'a':2} results in {'a':2}, while f(a=1, a=2) is an error. (This form is a SyntaxError; the dynamic case f(a=1, **{'a': 1}) is a TypeError.) For me, allowing f(*a, *b) and f(**d, **e) and all the other combinations for function calls proposed by the PEP is an easy +1 -- it's a straightforward extension of the existing pattern, and anybody who knows what f(x, *a) does will understand f(x, *a, y, *b). Guessing what f(**d, **e) means shouldn't be hard either. Understanding the edge case for duplicate keys with f(**d, **e) is a little harder, but the error messages are pretty clear, and it is not a new edge case. The sequence and dict flattening syntax proposals are also clean and logical -- we already have *-unpacking on the receiving side, so allowing *x in tuple expressions reads pretty naturally (and the similarity with *a in argument lists certainly helps). From here, having [a, *x, b, *y] is also natural, and then the extension to other displays is natural: {a, *x, b, *y} and {a:1, **d, b:2, **e}. This, too, gets a +1 from me. So that leaves comprehensions. IIRC, during the development of the patch we realized that f(*x for x in xs) is sufficiently ambiguous that we decided to disallow it -- note that f(x for x in xs) is already somewhat of a special case because an argument can only be a "bare" generator expression if it is the only argument. The same reasoning doesn't apply (in that form) to list, set and dict comprehensions -- while f(x for x in xs) is identical in meaning to f((x for x in xs)), [x for x in xs] is NOT the same as [(x for x in xs)] (that's a list of one element, and the element is a generator expression). The basic premise of this part of the proposal is that if you have a few iterables, the new proposal (without comprehensions) lets you create a list or generator expression that iterates over all of them, essentially flattening them: >>> xs = [1, 2, 3] >>> ys = ['abc', 'def'] >>> zs = [99] >>> [*xs, *ys, *zs] [1, 2, 3, 'abc', 'def', 99] >>> But now suppose you have a list of iterables: >>> xss = [[1, 2, 3], ['abc', 'def'], [99]] >>> [*xss[0], *xss[1], *xss[2]] [1, 2, 3, 'abc', 'def', 99] >>> Wouldn't it be nice if you could write the latter using a comprehension? >>> xss = [[1, 2, 3], ['abc', 'def'], [99]] >>> [*xs for xs in xss] [1, 2, 3, 'abc', 'def', 99] >>> This is somewhat seductive, and the following is even nicer: the *xs position may be an expression, e.g.: >>> xss = [[1, 2, 3], ['abc', 'def'], [99]] >>> [*xs[:2] for xs in xss] [1, 2, 'abc', 'def', 99] >>> On the other hand, I had to explore the possibilities here by experimenting in the interpreter, and I discovered some odd edge cases (e.g. you can parenthesize the starred expression, but that seems a syntactic accident). All in all I am personally +0 on the comprehension part of the PEP, and I like that it provides a way to "flatten" a sequence of sequences, but I think very few people in the thread have supported this part. Therefore I would like to ask Neil to update the PEP and the patch to take out the comprehension part, so that the two "easy wins" can make it into Python 3.5 (basically, I am accepting two-thirds of the PEP :-). There is some time yet until alpha 2. I would also like code reviewers (Benjamin?) to start reviewing the patch <http://bugs.python.org/issue2292>, taking into account that the comprehension part needs to be removed. -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

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PEP 638: Syntactic macros
by Mark Shannon Feb. 6, 2023

Feb. 6, 2023

Hi everyone, I've submitted my PEP on syntactic macros as PEP 638. https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0638/ All comments and suggestions are welcome. Cheers, Mark

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How about using modern C++ in development of CPython ?
by redradist＠gmail.com Oct. 19, 2022

Oct. 19, 2022

Hi all, What about of using modern C++ in developing CPython ? With C++ we can get the following benefits: 1) Readability - less code, most code is hidden by abstraction without losing performance 2) Maintainability - no code duplication in favor of using reusable classes 3) RAII - Resource Acquisition Is Initialization, predictable allocation and free resources ...

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PEP 563 and Python 3.10.
by Thomas Wouters July 22, 2022

July 22, 2022

(Starting a new thread so as not to derail any of the ongoing discussions.) Thanks, everyone, for your thoughts on Python 3.10 and the impact of PEP 563 (postponed evaluation of annotations) becoming the default. The Steering Council has considered the issue carefully, along with many of the proposed alternatives and solutions, and we’ve decided that at this point, we simply can’t risk the compatibility breakage of PEP 563. We need to roll back the change that made stringified annotations the default, at least for 3.10. (Pablo is already working on this.) To be clear, we are not reverting PEP 563 itself. The future import will keep working like it did since Python 3.7. We’re delaying making PEP 563 string-based annotations the default until Python 3.11. This will give us time to find a solution that works for everyone (or to find a feasible upgrade path for users who currently rely on evaluated annotations). Some considerations that led us to this decision: - PEP 563’s default change is clearly too disruptive to downstream users and third-party libraries to happen right now. We can’t risk breaking even a small subset of the FastAPI/pydantic users, not to mention other uses of evaluated type annotations that we’re not aware of yet. - PEP 563 provides no warning to users of the feature it’s disabling. Without that, we can’t expect users to be aware of the upcoming breakage. The lack of a warning was by design, and made sense in a world where type annotations were only consumed by static type checkers --- but that’s not actually the situation we’re in. There are clearly existing real-world, run-time uses of type annotations that would be adversely affected by this change. - Originally, PEP 563 was scheduled to take effect in Python 4, and this changed recently (after the discussion in the Language Summit of 2020). It's possible that third-party libraries and users didn’t plan to react in the current time frame as they were not aware of this change in timing. - There isn’t enough time to properly discuss PEP 649 or any of the alternatives before the beta 1 deadline, and we really need to make sure we don’t compound errors here. We need to look for a long term solution, which isn’t possible while still maintaining the release deadlines of Python 3.10. That means we’re also deferring PEP 649 to Python 3.11. In the Steering Council’s unanimous opinion, rolling back the default flip for stringified annotations in Python 3.10 is the least disruptive of all the options. We need to continue discussing the issue and potential solutions, since this merely postpones the problem until 3.11. (For the record, postponing the change further is not off the table, either, for example if the final decision is to treat evaluated annotations as a deprecated feature, with warnings on use.) For what it’s worth, the SC is also considering what we can do to reduce the odds of something like this happening again, but that’s a separate consideration, and a multi-faceted one at that. For the Steering Council, Thomas. -- Thomas Wouters <thomas(a)python.org> Hi! I'm an email virus! Think twice before sending your email to help me spread!

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PEP 651, Robust Stack Overflow Handling, Rejection notice
by Python Steering Council Jan. 31, 2022

Jan. 31, 2022

Hi Mark, Thank you for submitting PEP 651. The Steering Council has spent the past two weeks reviewing PEP 651. After careful consideration, we have decided to reject the PEP. The following were the key points that led us to this decision: * The benefits are not compelling enough. Deep recursion is not a common tool in Python, and even with PEP 651 it would not be efficient enough to make it a common tool. * The benefit of PEP 651 is negated as soon as a non-Python function is involved in the recursion, making the likelihood of it being useful even smaller. It also creates easy pitfalls for users who do end up relying on recursion. * We believe the PEP understates the disruption created by the technical solution of multiple Python stack frames per C call. Although this may be solvable, it will certainly cause substantial disruption to existing debuggers, tracers, and state inspection tools as they need to adapt to this change (which may not be trivial). * As the way to approach this will be platform-specific (as some parts of the proposal are not portable), this can cause generic Python code to behave differently on different platforms, making this kind of code less portable and less predictable. In the end, the benefit of the PEP does not outweigh the cost of the potential breakage, confusion, and unpredictability of the feature. With our appreciation, The Python Steering Council

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PEP 646 (Variadic Generics): final call for comments
by Matthew Rahtz Jan. 19, 2022

Jan. 19, 2022

Hi everyone, We've got to the stage now with PEP 646 that we're feeling pretty happy with it. So far though we've mainly been workshopping it in typing-sig, so as PEP 1 requires we're asking for some feedback here too before submitting it to the steering council. If you have time over the next couple of weeks, please take a look at the current draft and let us know your thoughts: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0646/ (Note that the final couple of sections are out of date; https://github.com/python/peps/pull/1880 clarifies which grammar changes would be required, now that PEP 637 has been rejected. We also have a second PR in progress at https://github.com/python/peps/pull/1881 clarifying some of the motivation.) Thanks! Matthew and Pradeep

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Should the definition of an "(async) iterator" include __iter__?
by Brett Cannon Oct. 29, 2021

Oct. 29, 2021

Over in https://github.com/python/typeshed/issues/6030 I have managed to kick up a discussion over what exactly an "iterator" is. If you look at https://docs.python.org/3/library/functions.html#iter you will see the docs say it "Return[s] an iterator <https://docs.python.org/3/glossary.html#term-iterator> object." Great, but you go the glossary definition of "iterator" at https://docs.python.org/3/glossary.html#term-iterator you will see it says "[i]terators are required to have an __iter__() <https://docs.python.org/3/reference/datamodel.html#object.__iter__> method" which neither `for` nor `iter()` actually enforce. Is there something to do here? Do we loosen the definition of "iterator" to say they *should* define __iter__? Leave it as-is with an understanding that we know that it's technically inaccurate for iter() but that we want to encourage people to define __iter__? I'm assuming people don't want to change `for` and `iter()` to start requiring __iter__ be defined if we decided to go down the "remove the __aiter__ requirement" from aiter() last week. BTW all of this applies to async iterators as well.

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PEP-646 question: unpacking into single Generic parameter
by willi＠schinmeyer.de Oct. 14, 2021

Oct. 14, 2021

Hello, first of all, thanks for working on variadic generics! I look forward to them. My question: all the examples in https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0646/ unpack into variadic arguments. But can I write code like this? ``` Ts = TypeVarTuple("Ts") def enumerate_args(f: Callable[[*Tuple[int, Ts]]], *args: *Ts): f(*enumerate(args)) ``` In particular I'm talking about the `*Tuple[int, Ts]` syntax. All the examples from the PEP use `*Ts` so I don't know if this is legal, but I hope so. This should probably be clarified in the PEP. -- Best regards, Willi Schinmeyer

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Worried about Python release schedule and lack of stable C-API
by jack.jansen＠cwi.nl Oct. 5, 2021

Oct. 5, 2021

I’m getting increasingly worried about the future of Python, and those worries have been exacerbated by the new yearly release rhythm, and the lack of a stable C-API that is full enough to entice extension writers to use it. PyPI packages and wheels are targeted to specific Python versions, which means that any project that depends on some of the larger extension packages (of which there are many, and many of which are must-have for many projects) now start lagging Python versions by years, because somewhere deep down in the dependency graph there is something that is still stuck at Python 3.8 (for example). I fully understand that 3.8 is good enough for the developers of that package, and that they have more pressing things to do than porting to 3.9 or 3.10, but it now keeps any project or package that depends on their software on 3.8 as well. And I also fully understand that some other developer who creates a new package that is essential to my application only targets the current Python release, or maybe one release back, but now if I need both the new package and and older one I’m up the well-known creek without a paddle. Building packages from source has become pretty much impossible nowadays, especially if your project is multi-platform and needs to interface to specific hardware, and you want to do the right thing with CI/CD builds and all that. On Linux/MacOS you have a chance when you try to specify all the dependencies for third party libraries and what not, but on Windows you’re dead in the water. And that is assuming you have the time and are smart enough to back port the new package to the old Python release, or the old package to the new Python release (and for the latter there’s probably a good reason why the developers haven’t done so already). Before you know it you have to install a couple of graphics card APIs for some obscure AI feature used by something you’ve never heard of, Cython for something else, and obscure vendor libraries for something else again. I think we really need to come up with some scheme whereby extension packages become more long-lived than a single Python release... -- Jack Jansen, <Jack.Jansen(a)cwi.nl>, http://www.cwi.nl/~jack If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution -- Emma Goldman

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