On 8/5/2019 4:30 PM, raymond.hettinger@gmail.com wrote:
Thanks for weighing in. I think this is an important usability discussion. IMO it is the number one issue affecting the end user experience with this release. If we could get more people to actively use the beta release, the issue would stand-out front and center. But if people don't use the beta in earnest, we won't have confirmation until it is too late.
We really don't have to go this path. Arguably, the implicit conversion of '\latex' to '\\latex' is a feature that has existed for three decades, and now we're deciding to turn it off to define existing practices as errors. I don't think any commercial product manager would allow this to occur without a lot of end user testing.
As much as I'd love to force this change through [0], it really does seem like we're forcing it. Especially given Nathaniel's point about the discoverability problems with compile-time warnings, I think we should delay a visible warning about this. Possibly in 3.9 we can do something about making these warnings visible at run time, not just compile time. I had a similar problems with f-strings (can't recall the details now, since resolved), and the compile-time-only nature made it difficult to notice. I realize a run-time warning for this would require a fair bit of work that might not be worth it. I think Raymond's point goes beyond this. I think he's proposing that we never make this change. I'm sympathetic to that, too. But the first step is to change 3.8's behavior to not make this visible. That is, we should restore the 3.7 warning behavior. Eric [0] And the real reason I'd like this is so we can add \e