Guido van Rossum :

Clearly, Eric went a bit fast for some modules (checking in syntax errors :-).

It was the oddest thing. The conversion was so mechanical that I found my attention wandering -- the result (as I noted in a couple of checkin comments) was that I occasionally hit ^C^C and triggered the commit a step too early. Sometimes Emacs makes things too easy! There were a couple of platform-specific modules I couldn't test completely, stuff like the two cddb.py versions. Other than that I'm pretty sure I didn't break anything. Where the test jigs looked lacking I beefed them up some. The only string imports left are the ones that have to be there because the code is using a string module constant like string.whitespace or one of the two odd functions that don't exist as methods, zfill and maketrans. Are there any plans to introduce boolean-valued string methods corresponding to the ctype.h functions? That would make it possible to remove most of the remaining imports. This was like old times. pulling an all-nighter to clean up a language library. I did a *lot* of work like this on Emacs back in the early 1990s. Count your blessings; the Python libraries are in far better shape. -- <a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a> Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of the citizens to keep and bear arms. [...] the right of the citizens to bear arms is just one guarantee against arbitrary government and one more safeguard against a tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible. -- Hubert H. Humphrey, 1960