On Wed, Feb 21, 2001 at 07:01:05PM +0100, Fredrik Lundh wrote:
Is it time to shut down python-dev? (yes, I'm serious)
Just in case it might not be obvious, I concur with Fredrik, and I usually try to have a bit less of a temper than him. I have to warn, though, I just came from a meeting with Ministry of Justice lawyers, so I'm not in that good a mood, though my mood does force me to drop my politeness and just say what I really mean: I keep running into the ugly sides of the principle of nested scopes in python, and the implementation in particular. Most of them could be fixed, but not *all* of them, and the impact of those that can't be fixed is entirely unclear. Will it break a lot of code ? Possibly. Will it annoy a lot of people ? Quite certainly, it already did. Will it force people to turn away in disgust ? Definately possibly, since it's nearly doing that for *me*. I'm not sure if I'd want to admit to people that I'm a Python developper if that means they'll ask me why in hell 2.1 was released with that deficiency. I have been able to argue my way out of the gripes I currently get, but I'm not sure if I can do that for 2.1. I think adding nested scopes like this is a very bad idea. Patching up the problems by adding more special cases in which the old syntax would work is not the right solution, even though I did initially think so. And I'd like to note that none of these issues were addressed in the PEP. The PEP doesn't even mention them, though 'from Tkinter import *' is used as an example code snippet. And it seems most people are either indifferent or against the whole thing. I personally think the old 'hack' is *way* clearer, and more obvious, than the nested scopes patch. But maybe my perception is flawed. Maybe all the pro-nested-scopes, pro-breakage people are keeping quiet, in which case I'll quietly sulk away in a corner ;P Mr.-Conservatively-Grumpy-ly y'rs, -- Thomas Wouters <thomas@xs4all.net> Hi! I'm a .signature virus! copy me into your .signature file to help me spread!