alternative names for single-letter constructors

[radix]

The single-letter constructors can be pretty annoying

• they're hard to search for in a module
• they very easily conflict with local variable names

It'd be nice if we had alternative, longer names for v, s, m, and b.

[radix]

For m, I can imagine just overriding pmap itself to allow **kwargs in addition to the positional arguments: pmap({'a': 1}, b=2) -> pmap({'a': 1, 'b': 2})

however, this doesn't work for v, s, and b, because a single-element *args would be ambiguous, so that's not a generalizable idea...

[tobgu]

I see your point but also value the shortnames for their conciseness.
Some (not necessarily good) alternatives:

import pyrsistent as p
p.v(1, 2, 3)

from pyrsistent as pv
pv(1, 2, 3)

Make a file with your own aliases and import from that file instead of directly from pyrsistent.

If you do come up with a good set of aliases I'm willing to include them. I don't have any of the top of my head but will think a bit about it.

[tobgu]

No really good ideas for this one as of yet. If you like living on the edge you may want to check out a hack I did a couple of days ago. :-)

https://github.com/tobgu/pyrthon

[frol]

I also find one-letter names a bit weird (un-Pythonic). I'm not sure when pmap, pvector, pset were introduced, but they seem to fix the weirdness and has to be encouraged to be used.

[tobgu]

pmap, pvector, pset, m, v, and s all came to be at the same time. Perhaps the short hands should be deprecated but then a descent alternative must exist. I'm thinking about pushing for https://github.com/tobgu/pyrthon a bit more but I haven't actually tested it extensively myself.

[radix]

wow, pyrthon is scary :) you could make registration a bit nicer by using a source-file coding declaration, e.g. # coding=pyrsistent, and have the codec do the transformation

[tobgu]

Thanks, will look into the coding option. I've never implemented anything using it before.

[radix]

Using it this way would definitely be a hack, since the mechanism is meant to be used for specifying the encoding of the source text (e.g. utf-8 vs ascii or whatever), but may be nice compared to having to register the modules externally.

Anyway I don't think I'd inflict either of these solutions on my production codebase, just a thought :)

[eugene-eeo]

Rust uses Vec; so a nice alternative is to rename them into Vec, Map, Set (although the last one might be a little controversial). Personally I find it a very attractive alternative to the other single-letter solution. At least they're shorter than list or dict ;)

[radix]

oh, by the way, about that coding thing, I found an old repo where I experimented with it: https://github.com/radix/python-parsing-shenanigans

[manishtomar]

+1. I don't find the necessity to have single-letter names.

[tobgu]

I will close this issue. I think there are a bunch of projects relying on the single letter initializers, they are not going away because it would break backward compatibility badly.