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IPC6 Developers' DayFriday October 17 1997, the final day of the Sixth International Python Conference, is Developers' Day, where the Python community will have the opportunity to discuss the future of Python with its creator Guido van Rossum. This provides the Python community with the exciting opportunity to be involved in charting the future course of the Python language and implementation.
Developer's Day TopicsDeveloper's Day is going to be less formal than the other days of the Python Conference. We have a number of topics, listed below, that are being championed by volunteers. These champions are responsible for presenting brief position statements or proposals, soliciting comments from the audience, and getting the discussions going. While it is very difficult to tell ahead of time which topics will generate the most heat (or light), and which will be non-controversial, we don't intend to let any particular topic go longer than about 45 minutes. By that time, most participants will be burned out anyway. The day will be roughly divided into six 45 minute sessions, although both the allotment of time per topic, and scheduling of topic per session has not yet been determined. There will be a morning break from 10:30 to 11:00 am, a lunch break from 12:30 to 2:00, and an afternoon break from 3:30 to 4:00 pm. A free-for-all is planned from 4:00 onwards, for those who want to stay late. Be prepared for impromptu discussions cropping up at any time of the day or night, over lunch, dinner, beers, or even the Monday Night football game where the Redskins will be beating the Cowboys. :-) Here is the current list of topics, along with their champions. Where possible, a short position statement is given if provided by the champion. Stay tuned to the newsgroup/mailing list for more details. We apologize in advance for any short-changing of times that might occur. There's lots to discuss, and I'm sure more interesting topics will crop up as the conference progresses. If past conferences are any indication, this should be one of the livelier days! :-)
For questions and comments, please email Barry Warsaw, Developers' Day Chair, IPC6 Position StatementsObject InterfacesChampion: Jim Fulton Sixth International Python Conference Developer's Day Session on Language Features or Idioms to Support Object Interfaces The 6th Internationl Python Workshop will feature a developers day that provides a place to discuss and debate Python language issues "face-to-face". The subject of one of these sessions will be language features or idioms to support object interfaces. Problem Two of the Fundemental ideas in object oriented development are - separation of object interfaces from object implementation, and - ability to use objects with the same interface but different implementations interchangably. When used properly, these two features provide many benefits, such as safety, stability, flexibility, reuse, and so on. Unfortunately, most computer languages provide very little support for reasoning about or testing interfaces. Worse, many languages provide incomplete or missleading interface information. Compounding the problem is that commonly used jargon has many and often conflicting interpretations. For example, the terms "class" and "type" may alternately mean interface or implementation. Even the term "interface" can have different meanings. For some, "interface" refers to method signatures, while for others, the term connotes identical behavior. For the sake of this discussion, I will use the term interface in the stronger sense. Two objects have the same interface if they have the same abstract behavior and are are substitutable wrt the interface. For some time, Python programmers have wanted simple and efficient means to be able to test object interfaces. Foe example, a function may be willing to accept an argument that is either a "number" or a "sequence" and must be able to test whether the argument is one or the other to decide how it is used. As Python is used for larger projects and in a larger number of domains, reliability of Python programs is an increasing concern. People would like language support to help assure program correctness. Python 1.5 adds the ability to include assertions in programs and recent advances in the ability to extend class semantics provides the ability to experiment with argument interface checking and Meyer's "development by contract" It has been suggested that this session might be combined with a session on use of static typing to support optimization. I assert that this sort of typing is really about implementation, not interfaces. I beleave strongly that reasoning about interfaces and reasoning about implentation should be kept distinct. Some disagree with me on this point. Objective The objective of this session is to explore possible language features or idioms to support interfaces. Format I would like to follow the following format for this session: - Brief overview of the problem, - Position statements - Discussion Participants and non-participants are invited to submit *concise* position statements to me (at least 24 hours) prior to the session. Position statements should address one or more of the following topics: - Needs and requirements for interfaces, - Proposals for langauage features or idionms to support interface, - Aguments for or against separation of abstract interfaces from static typing. Time permitting and authors present and willing willing, position statements may be presented during the session. Note that the entire session is only 45 minutes in length, and I want to reserve a significant amount of time for discussion. Position statements must be concise. No more than 5 minutes will be allowed per presentations. If there is not enough time for positions to be presented individually, I will do my best to summarize. Concise position statements will be included in the proceedings. I apologize for the lateness of this post. Combining Python Type and Class Semantics Champion: Jim Fulton International Python Conference VI Developer's Day Session on Combining Python Type and Class Semantics The 6th Internationl Python Conference will feature a developers day that provides a place to discuss and debate Python language issues "face-to-face". The subject of one of these sessions will be integration of python types and classes. Problem Currently, Python provides two ways of defining new kinds of objects: - Python classes (written in Python) - Extension types (written in C or C++) Each approach has it's strengths. Extension types provide much greater control to the programmer and, generally, better performance. Because extension types are written in C, the programmer has greater access to external resources. (Note that Python's use of the term type has little to do with the notion of type as a formal specification.) Classes provide a higher level of abstraction and are generally much easier to develop. Classes provide full inheritance support, while support for inheritance when developing extension types is very limited. Classes provide run-time meta-data, such as method documentation strings, that are useful for documentation and discovery. Classes act as factories for creating instances, while separate functions must be provided to create instances of types. Python programmers are often confused by the differences between extension type instances and class instances. - A type instance has a meaningful type, but no __class__. A class instance has a meaningful __class__, but a meaningless type. - To discover a type instance's interface, __methods__ and __members__ attributes must be inspected. To discover a class instance's interface, it's, __dict__, and __class__ attributes must be inspected. - A class provides access to method meta-data, a type does not. - A class instance is created in a standard way, by calling it's class. There is no standard way to create a type instance. - A class can be subclassed but a type can not (usually). - class instance methods have discoverable method signatures, but type instance methods do not. Objective The objective of this session is to to take a step toward integrating classes and types. Format I would like to follow the following format for this session: - Brief overview of the problem, - Position statements - Discussion Participants are invited to submit position statements to me (at least 24 hours) prior to the session. Position statements should address one or both of: - Requirements for or desirability of class/type integration, - Proposals or approaches for class/type integration Time permitting and author's willing, position statements may be presented during the session. Unicode/I18N Champion: Martin v. Loewis Problem Python's text processing today is based on the built-in string type, which allows to represent byte sequences. Most character processing modules assume one byte per character. In order to support more than one language, or to support languages with more than 256 characters, some sort of wide string or multi byte character string processing is required. One approach is to support Unicode, the other is to allow for arbitrary character sets (the approaches are not necessarily exclusive). Tightly related to the character sets is the user interface: The user needs to enter information in her native language, and wants to get results displayed using that language. When it comes to introducing new interfaces in Python, a top requirement is to make the modules uniform across platforms. Unfortunately, there is no straight-forward solution, as nationalization issues are handled differently among platforms. Objective The objective of this session is to communicate the needs of both end users and application programmers for internationalization support in Python. Participants are invited to contribute to the following issues: - reports about I18N projects in general, or I18N projects involving Python in particular - application programmer requirements for I18N in the core language and the standard libraries - approaches to harmonizing new interfaces among platforms Python-C/C++ Integration Tools Champion: David M. Beazley Problem: Python is being used increasingly as an extension language for C and C++ systems. A number of tools such as SWIG, Modulator, GRAD, etc... have also been developed to ease the process of C/C++ extension writing. However, there are also a number of concerns including (but not limited to) the following : - Are automated tools effective at building Python extensions? - Can Python be used effectively with existing C/C++ applications? What are the limitations? - Separation of C/C++ implementation and the Python interface. (i.e. should C/C++ programs know that Python is involved?) - How do you effectively manage C/C++ objects in Python? - How do you use advanced C++ features such as templates, exceptions, namespaces, etc... - Integration with other Python extensions (Numeric Python, extension classes, etc...). Objective: The purpose of this session is to discuss the state of Python-C/C++ integration tools and techniques. Participants are invited to contribute to any number of the following topics (or any other closely related topic) : - Successful use of Python extension tools. - Failures and shortcomings of existing approaches. - Alternative and novel Python extension writing techniques. StringSIG Champions: Robin Friedrich So far the String-SIG's only deliverable item has been an enhanced regular expression module. Since beta versions of this module are now available for testing, should the SIG be shut down, or are there new tasks to be considered? Some suggestions for a new objective have been: a Unicode string type; internationalization issues; code for implementing and generating parsers. Inter-Language Unification (ILU) and Python Champion: Jody Winston My goal for this session is to moderate and to initiate the discussion between application developers that use Python and ILU. Objectives: This session will discuss the design and development of applications that use ILU and Python. Format: Applications using ILU and Python Sample Discussion Topics New CORBA bindings for Python ISL vs IDL Integration with other languages Performance Platforms Problems Debugging applications State of the Distributed Object SIG I apologize for the lateness of this post. |