Re: [Pyobjc-dev] Auto bridging instances by conversion

[Ronald O. <ous...@ci...>]

On Monday, Feb 3, 2003, at 16:58 Europe/Amsterdam, Bob Ippolito wrote:

>
> On Monday, Feb 3, 2003, at 10:30 America/New_York, Just van Rossum 
> wrote:
>
>> bb...@ma... wrote:
>>
>>> The fact that NSString<->PyString are converted is a bug --
>>
>> To me it isn't, it's what I call "transparent". This feature is
>> absolutely a _pleasure_ to work with.
>
> It's what I call a "real pain in the ass", at least when 
> NSMutableString gets bridged into a PyString.
A real argument for not doing the conversion!

Not converting can also be problematic: What if you pass the NSString 
to an extension-function that expects a string (like open), unless 
these get changed to also accept NSStrings you'll have to perform 
manual conversion from NSString to a python string.

>
> Why can't we wrap the NSString class cluster with some cruft that 
> makes it pythonic instead of converting it to something that it 
> wasn't?  There is absolutely no namespace clash between NSString and 
> PyString, with the added bonus that NSString can do just about 
> everything that PyString can with one line of code or less.

The 'problem' with NSString is that its interface is much more 
powerfull than that of python strings (the word cruft springs to mind 
when seeing methods like stringByAbbreviatingWithTildeInPath).

In case anyone cares: I (still) haven't made made my mind up on whether 
automaticly converting values is a usefull feature or not. There are to 
many irritating 'features' on either solution (converting or wrapping).

Ronald