On Mar 5, 2014, at 5:43 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> wrote:


On 6 Mar 2014 08:11, "Donald Stufft" <donald@stufft.io> wrote:
>
> Most of those are pretty easy to reason about being “False”, they all have some
> concept of empty, nothing, etc. Midnight however is not any more or less a time
> than one minute past midnight. Even worse, if you consider not explicitly
> checking for None a bug in that application code, debugging that code is made
> much more difficult because of the fact that for some reason "midnight" is
> considered False.
>
> That is the real problem here, sure people should be using ``is None`` checks
> but until people are perfect and never write buggy code, we have to contend
> with the fact that sometimes people will not write ``is None``. Making that
> particular error harder to debug is doing nothing but wasting their time and
> having Python be punitive for what in many cases may be a mistake.

Right, the core problem here is changing an often harmless style problem into a subtle behavioural bug. I changed the title on http://bugs.python.org/issue13936 accordingly, reopened it and described the appropriate next steps for anyone that is motivated enough about the issue to actually do the work.

We'll see if the enthusiasm for changing the behaviour translates into anyone being sufficiently interested to work out the details of the deprecation warning and the associated documentation and test updates.

Regards,
Nick.

>
> -----------------
> Donald Stufft
> PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA
>
>
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Thanks Nick :)

-----------------
Donald Stufft
PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA