From: Gregory Ewing on
Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> This
> reminds me of time-travellers suffering from "time lag" in the wonderful
> novel "To Say Nothing Of The Dog" by Connie Willis.

One of the many excellent reasons why Guido keeps tight
control over the keys to his time machine. Time-lagged
joyriding teenagers careening around the space-time
continuum can be quite a hazard.

--
Greg
From: Steven D'Aprano on
On Sat, 12 Jun 2010 14:13:44 +1200, Gregory Ewing wrote:

> Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>> This
>> reminds me of time-travellers suffering from "time lag" in the
>> wonderful novel "To Say Nothing Of The Dog" by Connie Willis.
>
> One of the many excellent reasons why Guido keeps tight control over the
> keys to his time machine. Time-lagged joyriding teenagers careening
> around the space-time continuum can be quite a hazard.

Imagine the havoc if RantingRick accidentally goes back in time and
deactivates the Timbot.

--
Steven

From: Stephen Hansen on
On 6/11/10 7:11 PM, Gregory Ewing wrote:
> Stephen Hansen wrote:
>
>> There's very little you can do with pywin32 that you can't do with
>> ctypes.
>
> Except, apparently, use it from another module in the stdlib. :-(
>

Yeah. I get the policy in general, a proliferation of ctypes stuff could
be very bad -- but if code is very careful with type-checking and stuff,
it should be possible to get an exception, I'd hope.

Otherwise it makes certain windows-workarounds very problematic. You
basically /have/ to write a C extension :|

--

Stephen Hansen
... Also: Ixokai
... Mail: me+list/python (AT) ixokai (DOT) io
... Blog: http://meh.ixokai.io/

From: Mark Lawrence on
On 12/06/2010 03:34, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Sat, 12 Jun 2010 14:13:44 +1200, Gregory Ewing wrote:
>
>> Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>>> This
>>> reminds me of time-travellers suffering from "time lag" in the
>>> wonderful novel "To Say Nothing Of The Dog" by Connie Willis.
>>
>> One of the many excellent reasons why Guido keeps tight control over the
>> keys to his time machine. Time-lagged joyriding teenagers careening
>> around the space-time continuum can be quite a hazard.
>
> Imagine the havoc if RantingRick accidentally goes back in time and
> deactivates the Timbot.
>

Not a chance, if Dr Who can take on baddies like the daleks, yetis and
cybermen Ranting Rick would be a piece of cake. :) My 13 year old will
be glued to BBC1 tonight at 18:45 BST to see his hero (Dr Who that is)
in action.

Down with baddies.

Mark Lawrence.

From: Martin v. Loewis on
> Yeah. I get the policy in general, a proliferation of ctypes stuff could
> be very bad -- but if code is very careful with type-checking and stuff,
> it should be possible to get an exception, I'd hope.

Only if you can live with the respective module not being available all
the time.

The issue is not that you may mistakes in the ctypes code, thus allowing
users to crash Python. The issue is that if users remove ctypes (which
they may want to do because it's not trustworthy), then your module will
stop working (unless you have a fallback for the case that ctypes is
unavailable).

In general, it's undesirable that absence of some module causes a
different module to stop working in the standard library, except that
absence of Tkinter clearly causes IDLE and turtle to stop working.

> Otherwise it makes certain windows-workarounds very problematic. You
> basically /have/ to write a C extension :|

That's not problematic at all, for the standard library. Just write that
C extension.

Regards,
Martin