[python-committers] Language moratorium

[Brett Cannon]

On Thu, Jul 19, 2018, 01:24 Victor Stinner, <vstinner at redhat.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> 2018-07-18 18:11 GMT+02:00 Stefan Krah <stefan at bytereef.org>:
> > Perhaps we could have one again, say for 12 months so we can figure
> things
> > out. Other Python implementations may welcome the moratorium so they can
> > catch up.
>
> Python 3.8 has a new syntax for assignment expressions (PEP 572). A
> moratorium of 12 months in practice means no other syntax changes for
> Python 3.8. I strongly prefer to introduce syntax changes early in the
> development cycle, rather than late, to give time to third party
> modules to be updated (ex: linters like flake8 or pylint).
>
> I am unable to decide if a moratorium is a good idea. For example, I
> was (strongly) against f-string at the beginning, and wrote that it
> was possible to write the same thing without f-string. You can say the
> same for PEP 572 which is "more or less" pure syntax sugar. But Python
> 3.6 also got a simple change to allow underscore in numbers for
> readability (PEP 515) and I now really love that feature.
>
> On the side, I would like to slow down syntax changes. On the other
> side, I started to really love latest syntax changes...
>
> What about other syntax changes like async and await which became real
> keywords? IMHO it's also a major enhancement for asyncio, even if they
> were more or less already keywords :-)
>
> When I look back at syntax changes since Python 3.4, it's really hard
> for me to say that I prefer to stay at Python 3.4 (syntax) forever and
> never use Python 3.5, 3.6 and 3.7 new syntaxes... When I can use them,
> I started to strongly prefer f-string over str % args (which now kind
> of look as "legacy" compared to f-string) or its verbose brother
> str.format(args).
>
> On of the reason which motivated Facebook and Instagram to migrate
> from Python 2.7 directly to 3.5 was to get the new async and await
> keywords. So new syntaxes can be the new "killer feature" of a
> specific Python release, at least for some use cases.
>

Then we would have to solve our governance problem sooner rather than
later. But i don't think every Python release has to make a huge splash.

-Brett


> Victor
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