[Python-Dev] breaking list.append()

Greg Stein gstein@lyra.org
Tue, 29 Feb 2000 16:12:29 -0800 (PST)


On Wed, 1 Mar 2000, Mark Hammond wrote:
> > Why don't we simply move forward with the assumption that PythonWin and
> > Scintilla will be updated?
> 
> Done :-)

hehe...

> However, I think dropping it now _is_ a little heavy handed.  I decided to
> do a wider search and found a few in, eg, Sam Rushings calldll based ODBC
> package.
> 
> Personally, I would much prefer a warning now, and drop it later.  _Then_ we
> can say we have made enough noise about it.  It would only be 2 years ago
> that I became aware that this "feature" of append was not a feature at all -
> up until then I used it purposely, and habits are sometimes hard to change
> :-)

What's the difference between a warning and an error? If you're running a
program and it suddenly spits out a warning about a misuse of list.append,
I'd certainly see that as "the program did something unexpected; that is
an error."

But this is all moot. Guido has already said that we would be amenable to
a warning/error infrastructure which list.append could use. His
description used some awkward sentences, so I'm not sure (without spending
some brain cycles to parse the email) exactly what his desired defaults
and behavior are. But hey... the possibility is there, and is just waiting
for somebody to code it.

IMO, Guido has left an out for people that are upset with the current
hard-line approach. One of those people just needs to spend a bit of time
coming up with a patch :-)

And yes, Guido is also the Benevolent Dictator and can certainly have his
mind changed, so people can definitely continue pestering him to back away
from the hard-line approach...

Cheers,
-g

-- 
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/