On 8/6/2011 8:29 AM, Guido van Rossum wrote:
Do you realize that __xxx__ names can have any semantics they darn
well please?
That does not seem to be to be the issue Cristoff raised.
If a particular __xxx__ name (or some aspect of it) is
undocumented that's not a bug (not even a doc bug), it just means
"hands off".
"__abstractmethods__" is used in the stdlib at least in abc.py:
95 class ABCMeta(type):
...
116 def __new__(mcls, name, bases, namespace):
...
123 for name in getattr(base, "__abstractmethods__", set()):
124 value = getattr(cls, name, None)
125 if getattr(value, "__isabstractmethod__", False):
126 abstracts.add(name)
127 cls.__abstractmethods__ = frozenset(abstracts)
Since this module implements a PEP (3119) and is not marked as CPython
specific, it should run correctly on all implementations. So
implementors need to know what the above means. (
The doc to abc.py invites readers to read this code:
**Source code:** :source:`Lib/abc.py`
For both reasons, this attribute appears to be part of Python rather
than being private to CPython. If so, the special name *should* be
documented somewhere.
If it should *never* be used anywhere else (which I suspect after seeing
that it is not used in numbers.py), that could be said.
"__abstractmethods__: A special attribute used within ABCmeta.__new__
that should never be used anywhere else as is has a special-case effect
for this one use."
The problem with intentionally completely not documenting names publicly
accessible in the stdlib code or from the interactive interpreter is
that the non-documentation is not documented, and so the issue of
documentation will repeatedly arise. The special names section of 'data
model' could have a subsection for such. "The following special names
are not documented as to their meaning as users should ignore them." or
some such.
--
Terry Jan Reedy
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