[Guido]
... (1) PEP 237 promises that after the new semantics are introduced for hex/oct literals and conversions, and left shifts, operations that cause a different result than before will produce a warning that is on by default. Given the pain we've suffered through the warnings in 2.3 about this stuff, I propose to forget about these warnings. The new semantics are clear and consistent, warnings would just cause more distress, and code first ported to 2.3 will already have silenced the warnings.
+1, and especially since it looks like 2.3 is going to become the next 1.5.2 (i.e., the version everyone flocks to, and then badgers you about for the next 20 years <wink>).
(2) PEP 237 promises that repr() of a long should no longer show a trailing 'L'. This is not yet implemented (i.e., repr() of a long still has a trailing 'L'). First, past experience suggests that quite a bit of end user code will break, and it may easily break silently: there used to be code that did str(x)[:-1] (knowing x was a long) to strip the 'L', which broke when str() of a long no longer returned a trailing 'L'. Apparently some of this code was "fixed" by changing str() into repr(), and this code will now break again. Second, I *like* seeing a trailing L on longs, especially when there's no reason for it to be a long: if some expression returns 1L, I know something fishy may have gone on.
+1. Changing string representations is always traumatic (lots of programs rely on parsing them), and I have a hard time imagining what positive good could come from stripping the 'L'. Making that change for str(long) seemed like pure loss from my POV (broke stuff and helped nothing).
Any comments on these? Should I update PEP 237 to reflect this?
The PEP should reflect The Plan, sure.