Re: [Pyobjc-dev] Objective-P?

[Ronald O. <ron...@ma...>]

On 12 Nov, 2009, at 11:59, Anders Hovmöller wrote:

> 
> 
> On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 11:18 AM, Orestis Markou <or...@or...> wrote:
> 
> On 12 Nov 2009, at 11:59, Ronald Oussoren wrote:
> 
> > What really annoys me though is that I haven't been able to find a way to get clear integration of Cocoa and Python without changing the Python syntax, and without using manual translation of method names (as was used by the Java-Cocoa bridge).
> 
> I've given some thought to that in the past, and of course I know it comes up on the list every couple of months.
> 
> I think an important step is maintaing the order of the **kwargs dictionary:
> 
> def set(self, **kwargs):
>     # construct method name from kwargs
>     # extract positional args from kwargs
>     objc.dispatch(methodname, args)
> 
> 
> foo.set(Value=1, forKey='a')
> foo.set(forKey='a', Value=1)
> 
> If those calls could be differentiated in the body of 'set', would it not help? Some cases could be ambiguous, but in that case a warning could be emitted and the current convention could be used instead.
> 
> Mapping python-style named parameters to objective-c message sending would probably incur quite a bit of overhead, and the end result, in my mind, ends up being not so readable either.

I agree with your readability concerns, a generic interface for sending messages would look somethink like this:

     someObject(setValue=42, forKey="foo")

It is far from obvious that this dispatches to a method, rather than calling a function with keyword arguments. This also doesn't work with methods that do not have arguments.

Ronald