[Peter Funk]
I believe __future__ is a bad name. What appears today as the bright shining future will be the distant dusty past of tomorrow. But the name of the module is not going to change anytime soon. right?
The name of what module? Any statement of the form from __future__ import shiny becomes unnecessary as soon as shiny's future arrives, at which point the statement can be removed. The statement is necessary only so long as shiny *is* in the future. So the name is thoroughly appropriate.
Please call it __progress__ or __history__ or even __python_history__ or come up with some other name.
Sorry, but none of those make any sense given the intended use. It's not a part of Python 2.1 "history" that nested scopes won't be the default before 2.2!
What about __python_bloat__ ? <duck ;-)>.
*That* one makes some sense.
In my experience of computing it is a really bad idea to call anything 'new', 'old', 'future', '2000' or some such because those names last much longer than you would have believed at the time the name was choosen.
The purpose of __future__ is to supply a means to try out future incompatible extensions before they become the default. The set of future extensions will change from release to release, but that they *are* in the future remains invariant even if Python goes on until universal heat death. Given the rules I already posted, it will be very easy to write a Python tool to identify obsolete __future__ imports and remove them (if you want).