Larry Hastings <larry@hastings.org> writes:
Recently-ish on c.l.py3k (iirc) folks were discussing how to write a script that exited with a human-friendly warning message if run under an incompatible version of the language. The problem with this code:
import sys if sys.version < 3: sys.exit("Sorry, this script needs Python 3000")
is that the code only executes once tokenization is finished--if your script uses any incompatible syntax, it will fail in the tokenizer, most likely with an error message that doesn't make it particularly clear what is going on.
Personally, in scenarios where I'm worried about that, I just make my entry point script a thin one with code suitable for any releases I'm worried about, and only import the main script once the version checks have passed. It also permits conditional importing of a version-specific script when that's appropriate as well. Avoids the need to introduce execution into the tokenizer, and trying to worry about all the possible types of comparisons you might want to make (and thus need to be supported by such execution). -- David