[Python-Dev] deprecating string module?

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Skip Montanaro wrote:
>     >> It has nothing to do with 11k worth of disk space and everything to
>     >> do with "there's one (best) way to do it".
> 
>     mal> That's a silly phrase. I agree that there should always be a
>     mal> straight-forward and intuitive way to do things, but I don't go for
>     mal> such a dogma type argument and I'm sure you don't either :-)
> 
> It's not dogma.  It's a catch phrase, I agree, but I think the concept does
> have merit.  

Sure it does, but not in the sense of
"there's only one way to do it: mine" ;-)

>     mal> If I want to write code which works in all Python versions starting
>     mal> from 1.5.2 onwards, I should be able to do this.
> 
> This seems like a good project for the Python Business Forum.  How about
> developing some hard numbers that indicate what fraction of Python users use
> what version of Python?  It would have to be sensitive to the type of users
> and their platform, but would be useful information for all Python
> programmers to have.

Indeed.

> I am personally getting rather tired of the "you can't do that! it's not
> 1.5.2-compatible!"  whine without any justification other than "RedHat still
> ships 1.5.2".

eGenix and most other companies providing Python extensions
I know of still support Python 1.5.2. Many users still like
1.5.2 for its stability and better performance.

For some statistics, I get around

	 4000 hits on Google for "Python 1.4"
	52000 hits on Google for "Python 1.5"
	31000 hits on Google for "Python 2.0"
	44000 hits on Google for "Python 2.1"
     	36000 hits on Google for "Python 2.2"
	 2000 hits on Google for "Python 2.3"

 From this I take that the world has moved away from 1.4
but we're still far from saying Python 1.5.2 is dead.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
CEO eGenix.com Software GmbH
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