Andrew let me repost this mail of his to this list. It's worth a discussion here (if not in a larger forum). My responses are at the bottom. ------- Forwarded Message Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 20:17:55 -0500 From: "A.M. Kuchling" <amk1@erols.com> To: guido@python.org Subject: Python 1.6 timing I thought a bit more about the release schedule for 1.6, and like the idea of delaying it less and less. Another bad effect of delaying it is that not having Unicode in the core handicaps developing XML tools; we can continue working with wstrop, or integrate MAL's code into the XML-SIG's CVS tree, but it might mean abandoning the XML processing field to Perl & Tcl because the tools can't be made fully standard compliant in time. Options I can think of: 1) Delegating some control to a pumpkin holder [...]. 2) Releasing the Unicode+sre modules as separate add-ons to 1.5. (But would that impose annoying backward-compatibility constraints when they get integrated into 1.6?) 3) Add Unicode, sre, Distutils, plus other minor things and call it 1.5.5, meaning it's not as big a revision as a 1.6 release, but it's bigger than just another patchlevel of bugfixes. I don't remember what other features were planned for 1.6; was there anything major, if static typing is left for 2.0? - -- A.M. Kuchling http://starship.python.net/crew/amk/ Life's too short for chess. -- H.J. Byron ------- End of Forwarded Message There are several other things I can think of now that were planned for 1.6: revamped import, rich comparisons, revised coercions, parallel for loop (for i in L; j in M: ...), extended slicing for all sequences. I've also been thinking about making classes be types (not as huge a change as you think, if you don't allow subclassing built-in types), and adding a built-in array type suitable for use by NumPy. I've also received a conservative GC patch that seems to be fairly easy to apply and has some of Tim Peters' blessing. For 1.5.5 (what happened to 1.5.3 and 1.5.4?), we can have a more conservative agenda, as suggested by Andrew: Unicode and distutils are probably the most important things to integrate. (The import utilities are not ready for prime time in my opinion; there are too many issues.) Anybody care to be the pumpkin? That would cut the discussion short; otherwise the problem remains that I can't spend too much time on the next release unless I get funded for it; what little money I've received for CP4E I had better spend on getting some CP4E-related results ASAP, because the next installment of this funding is very much at stake... --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/) Life's better without braces. -- Bruce Eckel