On Sun, Feb 24, 2013 at 12:57 AM, Vinay Sajip
Nick Coghlan
writes: Daniel is a fan of this syntax, but I think it is inferior to the implied approach, so don't expect it to survive to any accepted version of the PEP :)
Another thing against ~= is that it isn't valid Python syntax. It's not a deal- breaker, but it does mean that you can't e.g. use the ast module in the implementation. This might be a factor if the mini-language ever grows (as it recently did, adding parentheses).
Daniel persuaded me that the *semantics* of Ruby's ~> pessimistic version comparison operator are highly desirable. I liked them so much, I'm now proposing them as the default behaviour of version specifiers. Thus, the "~=" operator goes away, and you can use "==" to explicitly request the previously proposed default behaviour, or just append an extra ".0" if you're more pessimistic about a dependency's backwards compatibility policies than the default interpretation. This and other aspects will be brought up on distutils-sig at some point not too far in the future :) Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia