Am Die, 2002-08-06 um 15.27 schrieb Greg Ward:
> On 06 August 2002, Andreas Kostyrka said:
> > Well, it always take some definition of magic. If you take the uninited
> > CGI perl coder, than the namespace traversal already looks like magic.
>
> True, but Quixote was written by and for clueful, experienced Python
> programmers.  Anything that feels like magic to Andrew, Neil, and me is
> too magical.  Groping through function objects and looking at parameter
> names feels like magic to me.
Well, based on this, .ptl files are also. Compared with your import
hook, my argument parsing method is purest and most conservative python.

> (Oh yeah: cvs -d :pserver:anon@cvs.mems-exchange.org:/home/cvs co quixote)
password?
> Oops, should have kept reading.  That sounds reasonable to me -- nice
> clean way to allow people like you to hideously pervert Quixote's
> simple, obvious model of calling functions.  ;-)
Well, it's not that obvious. Especially request is a magic opaque object
that is wrongly documented. (for example it is NOT a mapping)

And it does not provide any support for dealing with CGI parameters.
After having written twice

def method(self,request):
        scaling=int(request.form.get("scaling","1"))
        angle=int(request.form.get("angle","0"))

my brain automatically started to refactoring.
It is obviously broken, because I have some "complicated" code that is
replicated throughout the source, ...

The first step would be:
def method(self,request):
        scaling,angle=self.argumentparser(request)

Better, but
a) slow (because it involves calling an additional function).
   [but this is debatable, as argument parsing does have also it's
    overhead.]
b) I have to look at a different place in the source to see how the
   parameters are processed and what the defaults are.

So I've arrived at the trivial:
def method(self,request,scaling=1,angle=0):
        ...

That does have the same benefits that .ptl templates have: It reuses
Python semantic behaviour.

And the only magic thing here is the binding of "request". There are
even ways around this magic, by defining __builtin__ request/response
functions. (functions, because this allows it to be threadsafe.)

Andreas