[Python-3000] [Python-ideas] Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Adam Olsen writes:

 > > Setuptools [pybang] works with versions 2.3 through 2.5, but of
 > > course that's because of the .exe wrappers.

As independent corroboration, this is basically the same way that
DJGPP (the DOS-extended version of GCC) provides Unix-y features like
access to the environment variables and command line parsing
(including redirection and pipes).  Of course since DJGPP produces
.exes, all it requires to use the feature is an #include.

 > Sounds good enough to me.  Maybe the only thing "wrong" is people
 > aren't sufficiently informed of how to be version-specific?

I think it's worse than that.  People don't *want* to be version-
specific (rather, they feel it is being "imposed" on them), and they
generally believe that their particular feature dependencies are quite
general and deserve conservation across version changes.

Some, like the "field heavyweight" quoted by the OP, are refreshingly
pragmatic about it.  They're quite happy to use a language that is
pretty crappy for most purposes today considered practical because it
does a great job of continuing to run the programs written to address
the "practical purposes" of three decades ago (if I interpret the "76"
in "SHELX-76" correctly).

Others, like the OP, want to freeze Python and request that updated
versions be considered an internal fork in the project rather than
evolutionary[1] progress whenever their inconvenience tolerance (which
is clearly high in the OP's case, let's not belittle that!) is
exceeded.

Footnotes: 
[1]  Cf. "punctuated equilibrium" for my notion of "evolution."