[Python-Dev] breaking list.append()

[Fredrik Lundh]

Greg Stein <gstein@lyra.org> wrote:
> On Wed, 1 Mar 2000, Fredrik Lundh wrote:
> > Greg Stein wrote:
> > > Note that Guido posted a note to c.l.py on Monday. I believe that =
meets
> > > your notification criteria.
> >=20
> > ahem.  do you seriously believe that everyone in the
> > Python universe reads comp.lang.python?
> >=20
> > afaik, most Python programmers don't.
>=20
> Now you're simply taking my comments out of context. Not a proper =
thing to
> do. Ken said that he wanted notification along certain guidelines. I =
said
> that I believed Guido's post did just that. Period.

my point was that most Python programmers won't
see that notification.  when these people download
1.6 final and find that all theirs apps just broke, they
probably won't be happy with a pointer to dejanews.

> And which is that? Care to help out? Maybe just a little bit?

this rather common pydiom:

    append =3D list.append
    for x in something:
        append(...)

it's used a lot where performance matters.

> Or do you just want to talk about how bad this change is? :-(

yes, I think it's bad.  I've been using Python since 1.2,
and no other change has had the same consequences
(wrt. time/money required to fix it)

call me a crappy programmer if you want, but I'm sure
there are others out there who are nearly as bad.  and
lots of them won't be aware of this change until some-
one upgrades the python interpreter on their server.

</F>