Donald Stufft <donald@stufft.io>:
My biggest problem with ``python3``, is what happens after 3.9. I know Guido doesn’t particularly like two digit version numbers and it’s been suggested on this list that instead of 3.10 we’re likely to move directly into 4.0 regardless of if it’s a “big” change or not.
python3 should be the name of the programming language specification. If CPython-4.0 supports all of the python3 programming language, /usr/bin/python3 should be a symbolic link to CPython-4.0. Or, if I reimplemented python3 with cyphon0.7, python3 could be a link to that. If CPython-4.x dropped support for some python3 features, you would no longer link python3 to it. Now, what would plain "python" be? It would make life easier for a lot of people if it were "python2" for all eternity. By analogy, look at #!/bin/sh, which used to invoke the Bourne shell, later /bin/bash and on modern Debian, /bin/dash. Marko