[Python-Dev] (no subject)

[Moore, Paul]

> > Guido van Rossum wrote:
> >=20
> > > Why don't you care about the backwards incompatibilities?
> >=20
> > Because it's addressed by using a str subclass.
>=20
> Which strikes *me* as an ugly hack. :-(

And it's dangerous. Code which assumes strings on sys.path and
modifies sys.path will fail silently rather than giving an error.

Example (not too realistic, I admit):

    sys.path =3D [ os.path.abspath(d) for d in sys.path ]

which collapses string subclasses to strings :-(

Paul.