Re: [Docutils-develop] Directives & Interpreted Roles

[David G. <go...@py...>]

Edward Loper wrote:
 > I'm looking at generalizing Docutils interpreted role system (along
 > the lines of the generalized directives system),

Great!  That's been on my mind lately too.

 > but I was unclear about why the directives system was designed the
 > way it was.

Seemed like a good idea at the time. ;-)

 > In particular, it seems to go through a fair amount of convolutions
 > to avoid loading submodules that it won't use.

That wasn't the motivation.  I never even thought of saving time by
avoiding unnecessary imports.

 > What's the motivation behind this?

To the reStructuredText markup language, directives are like extension
modules.  It just seemed natural to load them as required.  Avoiding
circular imports may have played a part as well.  Now I can imagine
that the number of directives may grow to the point where loading them
all beforehand *will* become prohibitively expensive.

Much of the complexity of the directive loading mechanism is related
to the multilingual feature, looking up directives by current-language
name, indexed into the registry of canonical names.  However, much of
the complexity may just be over-engineering (I'm as guilty of that as
the next guy, though I try to abstain ;-).

I've started to write my replies to the "Processing inline roles"
thread, but it's too late and I'm too tired.  Will follow up later.

-- 
David Goodger                               http://python.net/~goodger
For hire: http://python.net/~goodger/cv