Allow "none" values for Choices when included in constants and/or string is an allowable type

[rayrrr]

This is a more robust approach to resolving #3.

What I'm proposing and showing here is that, instead of converting 'none' to None objects and then testing that that has been done in multiple unit tests, we can just reject 'none' as a value in the appropriate cases within the validate method, in one place.

This passes all unit tests.

[freakboy3742]

I'm not convinced this is the right approach. We need to be very clear about the distinction between None (the Python symbolic value), "none" (a Python string with the value of "none") and NONE (a Python constant with the value of "none").

The current code (and tests) are a bit loose, and lean towards coercing "none" to None; I'd argue that's the original mistake. We shouldn't be allowing None at all.

Pack does this the right way - defining a constant NONE - but then gets caught in the loose coercion. That is the underlying problem that needs to be fixed, AFAICT.

[freakboy3742]

This makes me very skeptical. Why would we want to allow both 'none' as a string value, and None as a symbolic constant, rendered as a string indistinguishable from the string form?

[rayrrr]

This is a side effect of what you're calling the "original mistake." When making the proposed change, the ValueError's message also coerces Python None to the string 'none'. So, since we are allowing both None and 'none' as values in the proposed change, this is what the message ends up looking like (repeating 'none' twice).

[rayrrr]

I agree with you about the underlying problem. Coercing "none" to None never sat well with me either. Can you point me in the right direction to fix the issue at the root?

[rayrrr]

I did some more research on this.

If we need to distinguish between Python's None object and either of the NONE constant or the 'none' string literal, that's easy. But if we want to distinguish between the NONE constant and the 'none' string literal, there's no built-in way to do it in Python, because if we set NONE = 'none', then both

NONE == 'none'
and
NONE is 'none'

evaluate to True, and we don't have a === like JavaScript...in fact, the two things we compare even have the same hash and id in Python because of how it uses object references for "variables" internally.

If we need a workaround, I think a magic NONE constant based on a subclass of str is one option worth considering. If we do:

class MagicConstant(str):
    def is_constant(self):
        return True

NONE = MagicConstant('none')

when setting up the constant, then

NONE == 'none' evaluates to True,

but NONE is 'none' evaluates to False

so that could be useful. Magic can be bad, but if we need this functionality, this workaround might be worth it. I've confirmed this approach works on versions 2.7 and 3.6.

[freakboy3742]

So, we will need to differentiate the symbolic None from the string "none", but we don't need to differentiate the constant NONE = 'none' from the string "none" - those last two are equivalent (with the symbolic constant just being a convenience to avoid typos).

[rayrrr]

Good. No need for magic! So where do we go to get to the root of this?

[freakboy3742]

Closed in favour of #33.