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