(1) PEP 237 promises that after the new semantics are introduced for hex/oct literals and conversions, and left shifts, operations that cause a different result than before will produce a warning that is on by default. Given the pain we've suffered through the warnings in 2.3 about this stuff, I propose to forget about these warnings. The new semantics are clear and consistent, warnings would just cause more distress, and code first ported to 2.3 will already have silenced the warnings.
+1, The warnings cause more pain than they save. Part of the purpose of a warning is to leave you feeling unsettled -- I don't think that is a worthy goal when the code is going to work fine anyway. Let PyChecker or some such warn about prior version compatibility issues like that.
(2) PEP 237 promises that repr() of a long should no longer show a trailing 'L'. This is not yet implemented (i.e., repr() of a long still has a trailing 'L'). First, past experience suggests that quite a bit of end user code will break, and it may easily break silently: there used to be code that did str(x)[:-1] (knowing x was a long) to strip the 'L', which broke when str() of a long no longer returned a trailing 'L'. Apparently some of this code was "fixed" by changing str() into repr(), and this code will now break again. Second, I *like* seeing a trailing L on longs, especially when there's no reason for it to be a long: if some expression returns 1L, I know something fishy may have gone on.
-0, The reasons are good but this one has been promised for several years. It's time for an L free python -- one less thing to have to learn. If there is transition difficultly, let it be a prompt to consider applying the forthcoming Decimal module. If necessary, we could add a debug mode switch for L's to be on or off. By putting it the debug build, we keep people from using it in production code. The purpose is to allow code to be run twice to see if different results are obtained. Also, we can put migration advice in PEP 290 and whatsnew24.tex to grep for indicators like [:-1] on the same line as long() or repr().
Should I update PEP 237 to reflect this?
Yes, that's better than surprising people later. Raymond