[Python-Dev] breaking list.append()

Greg Stein gstein@lyra.org
Tue, 29 Feb 2000 16:57:56 -0800 (PST)


On Tue, 29 Feb 2000, Ken Manheimer wrote:
>...
> I agree with mark.  Why the sudden rush??  It seems to me to be unfair to
> make such a change - one that will break peoples code - without advanced
> warning, which typically is handled by a deprecation period.  There *are*
> going to be people who won't be informed of the change in the short span
> of less than a single release. Just because it won't cause you pain isn't
> a good reason to disregard the pain of those that will suffer,
> particularly when you can do something relatively low-cost to avoid it.

Sudden rush?!?

Mark said he knew about it for a couple years. Same here. It was a long
while ago that .append()'s semantics were specified to "no longer" accept
multiple arguments.

I see in the HISTORY file, that changes were made to Python 1.4 (October,
1996) to avoid calling append() with multiple arguments.

So, that is over three years that append() has had multiple-args
deprecated. There was probably discussion even before that, but I can't
seem to find something to quote. Seems like plenty of time -- far from
rushed.

Cheers,
-g

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