Raymond Hettinger wrote:
[Tim]
TP> If we have to drop a builtin, I never liked reduce <wink>, TP> although Jeremy pointed out that its most common use case no TP> longer requires writing a lambda, or importing operator.add:
[Barry]
Hey, if we'll killing off builtins, I vote for apply().
buffer() and intern() are two candidates for least understood, least used, and most likely not to be missed.
Hey, this is the positive response I was hoping for. You got the point. We do have functions which might perhaps not be dropped, but removed from C code. There is also a side effect for apply(), for instance: Controversely to divmod, apply is still found in 166 .py files of the 2.2 source dist. This is still more than 10 %, although apply() can be completely replaced by the new calling patterns. I believe that in the code base of the average user, this will look even worse, since nobody cares about changing working code. If we now quasi-deprecate apply by making it *slower*, simply by replacing the C code by a Python function that itself uses the new calling style, then we have less C code, still compatibility, *and* a good argument for everybody to replace apply by the new way to go. ciao - chris -- Christian Tismer :^) <mailto:tismer@tismer.com> Mission Impossible 5oftware : Have a break! Take a ride on Python's Johannes-Niemeyer-Weg 9a : *Starship* http://starship.python.net/ 14109 Berlin : PGP key -> http://wwwkeys.pgp.net/ work +49 30 89 09 53 34 home +49 30 802 86 56 pager +49 173 24 18 776 PGP 0x57F3BF04 9064 F4E1 D754 C2FF 1619 305B C09C 5A3B 57F3 BF04 whom do you want to sponsor today? http://www.stackless.com/