Guido van Rossum writes:
The proposed moratorium is a *conscious decision*, an intentional policy meant to have a certain effect. This is just the opposite of evolution in nature (unless you believe in "intelligent design" :-).
By Clarke's Law, I see no way to distinguish between the presence and the absence of intelligent design in nature.
While I mentioned 3.x in my original message about the moratorium, I didn't mean to imply that the moratorium would solve the slow uptake directly. The intent was to give people who would otherwise work on language change proposals more time and motivation to work on porting 3rd party packages to Py3k.
Time, yes, but I'm not sure I see where the motivation comes from. Do you mean something like: remove all hope from "design + maybe implementation" proposals, with the intent of encouraging "design + implementation + clear application to use case" proposals. where porting to Py3k should be a prolific source of use cases? ISTM that has been the desired historical criterion for inclusion in Python anyway. So a moratorium might reduce the number of "frivolous" proposals, but is it really going to encourage work on porting? (Those are all really yes/no questions from my standpoint.) If not, Steven d'Aprano's line that Python has been quite stable anyway, up to Python 3, and so (IIU him C) there's really no need for a formal moratorium, becomes very plausible. That is, since there doesn't seem to be a strong call for a moratorium from the Jython / Cython / IronPython / PyPy end. (So far, that it. I don't suppose the final word has been spoken by those developers, yet.)
PS. My elbow needs a couple more weeks of rest. Limiting myself to ultra-short emails.
May the Intelligent Designer have mercy on your elbow!<wink>