[Python-Dev] New PythonLabs site revealed!

[Ka-Ping Yee]

Guido van Rossum wrote:
> let this be an advance warning that it will be called Python 2.0.

On Fri, 30 Jun 2000, Vladimir Marangozov wrote:
> Guido van Rossum just won't stop surprising us! :-)

Will many be spooked by the jump in version number into fearing
incompatibility with older scripts...?

I wonder if we'll end up trying to persuade the user community that
the changes are small ("no, don't worry, your scripts will still
work") and yet big ("honest, it really deserves to be called 2.0,
it's not just a ploy") at the same time.

Perl 5 was basically incompatible with Perl 4.  Some things run,
but a lot don't.  (Actually many microversions of Perl 5 were
mutually incompatible with each other, but i'll ignore that. :) )

I've thought of the jump to Python3k (lowercase "k", please) much
like the Perl-4-to-Perl-5 jump: simple stuff is still okay but a lot
of guts have changed.  If i hadn't been "on the inside" watching
development activity, i might expect something of similar magnitude
upon hearing of going from Python 1.x to 2.0.

I guess we can point at Unicode and SRE as big things.


-- ?!ng