I will try to be intellectually honest:
[Thomas Wouters]
And I'd like to note that none of these issues were addressed in the PEP.
This also a *point*. Few days ago I have scanned the pre-checkin archive on this topic, the fix-point was, under BDFL influence:
- It will not do that much harm (but many issues were not raised) - Please no explicit syntax - Let's do it - Future newbies will be thankful because this was always a confusing point for them (if they come from pascal-like languages?)
I should admit that I like the idea of nested scopes, because I like functional programming style, but I don't know whether this returning 3 is nice ;)?
def f(): def g(): return y # put as many innoncent code lines as you like y=3 return g()
The point is that nested scopes cause some harm, not that much but people are asking themself whether is that necessary. Maybe the request that old code should compile as it is, is a bit pedantic, and making it always work but with a new semantic is worse.
But simply catching up as problem arise does not give a good impression. It really seems that there's not been enough discussion about the change, and I think that is also ok to honestely be worried about what user will feel about this? (and we can only think about this beacuse the feedback is not that much) Will this code breakage "scare" them and slow down migration to new versions of python? They are already afraid of going 2.0(?). It is maybe just PR matter but ...
The *point* is that we are not going from version 0.8 to version 0.9 of our toy research lisp dialect, passing from dynamic scoping to lexical scoping. (Yes, I think, that changing semantic behind the scene is not a polite move.)
We really need the BDFL proposing the right thing.
regards, Samuele Pedroni.