[Python-Dev] A house upon the sand

[Tim Peters]

On the deprecation of the string module:  where did this idea come from?
I've never seen anything saying that the string module is deprecated.  The
2.0 docs say that the three specific functions string.{atoi, atol, atof} are
deprecated as of 2.0, but that's it.

On the meaning of deprecation:  yes, it means they'll go away someday.

On gc semantics:  Section 3.1 ("Objects, values and types") of the Lang Ref
sez:

    Objects are never explicitly destroyed; however, when they become
    unreachable they may be garbage-collected. An implementation is
    allowed to postpone garbage collection or omit it altogether -- it is
    a matter of implementation quality how garbage collection is
    implemented, as long as no objects are collected that are still
    reachable. (Implementation note: the current implementation uses a
    reference-counting scheme which collects most objects as soon as
    they become unreachable, but never collects garbage containing
    circular references.)

If Python had a standard, the only thing that would change is that the
obsolete parenthetical comment would be removed.

On formal standardization:  not likely.  An ISO/ANSI std takes a minimum of
person-decades of work, and Guido would be unable to make the time even to
review committee documents.  IOW, he won't cooperate, because he can't, and
that's that.  Propose changes to the Lang Ref instead (for example, Guido's
intent was that binary operators of equal precedence be evaluated strictly
left to right in the absence of parens, but the Lang Ref never got around to
saying so).

On the pace of change:  by all objective measures, Python change ended the
day 2.0 was released <0.9 wink>.

the-lang-ref-is-the-only-std-you're-likely-to-get-ly y'rs  - tim