On Mon, 2012-02-27 at 15:23 -0500, R. David Murray wrote:
On Mon, 27 Feb 2012 14:50:21 -0500, Chris McDonough <chrism@plope.com> wrote:
Currently we handle 3.2 compatibility in packages that "straddle" via six-like functions. We can continue doing this as necessary. If the
It seems to me that this undermines your argument in favor of u''. Why can't you just continue to do the above for 3.3 and beyond?
I really don't know how long I'll need to do future development in the subset language of Python 2 and Python 3 because I can't predict the future. It could be two years, it might be five. Who knows. But I do know that I'm going to be developing in the subset of Python that currently runs on Python 2 >= 2.6 and Python 3 >= 3.2 for at least a year. And that will suck, because that language is a much less fun language in which to develop than either Python 2 or Python 3. Frankly, it's a pretty bad language. If we make this change now, it means a year from now I'll be able to develop in a slightly less sucky subset language if I choose to drop support for 3.2. And people who don't try to support Python 3 at all til then will never have to program in the suckiest subset like I will have had to. Note that u'' literals are sort of the tip of the iceberg here; supporting them will obviously not make development under the subset an order of magnitude less sucky, just a tiny little bit less sucky. There are other extremely annoying things, like str(bytes) returning the repr of a bytestring on Python 3. That's almost as irritating as the absence of u'' literals, but we have to evaluate one thing at a time. - C