[Python-Dev] Re: PendingDeprecationWarning

[François Pinard]

[Alex Martelli]

> On Wednesday 29 May 2002 06:42 pm, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> 	...
> > > oct()
> > > hex()
> >
> > Why?  I use these a lot...

> I assume the duplication of oct and hex wrt '%o'% and '%x'% was the
> reason to suggest silently-deprecating the former (trying to have 'just
> one obvious way' and all that).

Hi, people.  I'm revising many accumulated notes, while writing the draft
of a Python style and migration guide (in French) for a small team of
Python programmers, here.  By the way, I thank you all for the richness
of the exchanged ideas in that area, lately.  Also, poking around, I see
even a bit deeper than before how beautiful the Python project is!


Stumbling on the above message, I feel like making a further comment.
When I was learning Python, I found elegant to discover that Python had
all that is required so one could rewrite the `FORMAT % THINGS' operator,
if one wanted to.

If we deprecate built-ins (like `repr', `hex' and `oct') in favour of
leaving `%' as the only way, we would loose that elegance.  Moreover,
it might be more speedy not having to go through the interpretation of a
format string, and this might matter in some circumstances.

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard