Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
In software, it may make sense to have the stable periods be *much* more stable, since artificial systems are more fragile than natural C, because it occupies an "ecological niche" as a high-level assembly language, has been quite static since its original definition, even when it evolves.
I was going to stay out of this discussion, but I find it highly annoying to see all these references to C being "static". One need only glance at the length of GCC's changes for the major version numbers to see that it is not static by any stretch of the imagination. Furthermore, the abundance of code revision (even in Python itself!) to compile without warning or error in various version of C compilers over the years makes the label "quite static" as laughable. I believe what you really mean, and what everyone really means, is that there is a core language that is unchanged over long periods of time. Changes that caused previously compiling C programs to no longer compile correctly would be considered a blatant failure of the compiler. That is not to say there are "no new features," rather only features that are backwards compatible. As is repeatedly pointed out, people who really do high-quality, professional development for Python do not develop for the latest release of Python, they standardize on a minimum version number and use only the features in that language; this is no different than writing ISO C90 code rather than ISO C99. I fail to see how this is not *already* the model that Python and Python developers are already using. At it's heart, I think the point of what Guido proposed is for everyone to stop fscking with the language and just start using it (specifically the 3.x version of it). But, I think Guido's frustration with the lack of traction of 3.x is misplaced; it's less than a year ago that it was released, and many ignored 3.0 due to the io module. Nevertheless, it is Guido's language and he can do whatever he wants. -- Scott Dial scott@scottdial.com scodial@cs.indiana.edu