On Dec 3, 2019, at 16:54, Jan Bakuwel
On 4/12/19 1:07 pm, Greg Ewing wrote:
On 4/12/19 11:06 am, Jan Bakuwel wrote: If being brought up many times, .... sounds like a perfect candidate for a PEP to me.
The implication is that it has been brought up AND REJECTED multiple times. But you do have a point -- a rejected PEP would provide documentation of the reasons against for anyone bringing it up again in the future.
Interesting. Has it been rejected as PEP or as an idea?
Having a list of "rejected" ideas/PEPs with the reasons why it was rejected would indeed be great to have.
We do have a list of rejected PEPs. It’s a category in the overall list of PEPs (PEP 0). And the rejection reasons are in each PEP. Some of those rejected PEPs were even written specifically to be rejected, so there will be an answer for anyone who wonders “Why doesn’t Python do X?”, or so the next 42 times the idea comes up someone can just reply “Read PEP 789 and see if you have anything to add” instead of everyone rehashing the same arguments. There is no list of all rejected _ideas_, because a lot of ideas aren’t worth the effort to write a PEP or a formal rejection notice, and because PEP 0 would probably get pretty unwieldy if it included every half-baked idea that anyone ever mentioned. Is this one worthy of a PEP? Well, if you’re willing to put in the effort to make the best case for the idea, work through all the details, gather all the relevant threads and other links, and write it, even knowing it’ll be rejected, I’ll bet a core dev would be willing to sponsor it. And those are the only criteria there are for writing a PEP and adding it to the index. And if this idea has come up and been shot down many times over the decades, it doesn’t seem like it would be wasted effort to me. But if you’re not ready to give up on the idea yet, I wouldn’t focus on a PEP yet. I suspect that if you can’t get enough traction on -ideas, where you can directly respond to objections and refine your positive case, a frozen document is probably less likely to convince people. Plus, once it’s rejected, that’s … not quite final (I think ideas from rejected PEPs have been revived; I think the @ operator is an example?), but at least a lot more final.