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From: Oscar Benjamin <oscar.j.benjamin@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 10 May 2013 15:29:00 +0100
Subject: Re: object.enable() anti-pattern
To: Roy Smith <roy@panix.com>
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On 10 May 2013 15:01, Roy Smith <roy@panix.com> wrote:
> In article <mailman.1527.1368188358.3114.python-list@python.org>,
>  Robert Kern <robert.kern@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I'd be curious to see in-the-wild instances of the anti-pattern that
>> you are talking about, then. I think everyone agrees that entirely
>> unmotivated "enable" methods should be avoided, but I have my doubts
>> that they come up very often.
>
> As I mentioned earlier in this thread, this was a common pattern in the
> early days of C++, when exceptions were a new concept and handled poorly
> by many compilers (and, for that matter, programmers).
>
> There was a school of thought that constructors should never be able to
> fail (because the only way for a constructor to fail is to throw an
> exception).  The pattern was to always have the constructor succeed, and
> then either have a way to check to see if the newly-constructed object
> was valid, or have a separate post-construction initialization step
> which could fail.

It's not just because of exceptions. In C++ virtual method calls in a
constructor for a class A will always call the methods of class A even
if the object being constructed is actually of a subclass B because
the B part of the object isn't initialised when the A constructor is
called. There may be a better way to do this since I last used C++ but
as I remember it the two-phase pattern was a recommended way to
implement polymorphic behaviour during initialisation.


Oscar