Way back on 11/22/06, "Martin v. Löwis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Nick Coghlan schrieb: > > Martin v. Löwis wrote: > >> I personally consider it "good style" to rely on implementation details > >> of CPython; > > > > Is there a 'do not' missing somewhere in there? > > No - I really mean it. I can find nothing wrong with people relying on > reference counting to close files, for example. It's a property of > CPython, and not guaranteed in other Python implementations - yet it > works in a well-defined way in CPython. Code that relies on that feature > is not portable, but portability is only one goal in software > development, and may be irrelevant for some projects.
It's not necessarily future-portable either. Having your software not randomly break over time is relevant for most nontrivial projects. > Similarly, it's fine when people rely on the C type "int" to have > 32-bits when used with gcc on x86 Linux. Relying on behavior that's implementation-defined in a particular way for a reason (like int being 32 bits on 32-bit hardware) is one thing. Relying on behavior that even the implementors might not be consciously aware of (or consider important to retain across versions) is another. -j _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
