On 2012-03-01, at 5:52 PM, Armin Ronacher wrote:
Hi,
On 3/1/12 10:38 PM, Yury Selivanov wrote:
Sorry if I sounded like 'attacking' you. I certainly had no such intention, as I believe nobody on this list. Sorry if I sound cranky but I got that impression from the responses here (which are greatly different from the responses I got on other communication channels and by peers). You were just the unlucky mail I responded to :-)
It's OK ;)
But if you'd just stuck to the point, without touching very controversial topics of what version of python is a good choice and what is a bad, with full review of all porting scenarios with well-thought set of benchmarks, nobody would ever call your PEP "polemic". I tried my best but obviously it was not good enough to please everybody. In all honesty I did not expect that such a small change would spawn such a great discussion. After all what we're discussing here is the introduction of one letter to literals :-)
Well, unfortunately it's not that simple from the standpoint of how this change will be perceived by the community. If we have u'' syntax in python 3, will people even understand what is the key difference from python 2? Will the internet be polluted with weird source-code targeted only for python3, but with the wide use of u''? When to deprecate it, and will it ever be deprecated (as everybody is already tired with all this)? Will it further strengthen the common misbelief the porting is hard (as for the many of the projects it is not), or that the right way it to have one code-base for all versions? And that's just the beginning of such questions. And when this PEP was suddenly approved, many of us felt that all those questions are not answered and were not even discussed. - Yury