[Python-Dev] Re: Stability and change

[Guido van Rossum]

> >One question is how spin this.  Listing a long series of
> >incompatibilities presents the image of a language that has many
> >gratuitous incompatible changes -- which is not true and the opposite
> >of the message we want to convey.
> 
> This way madness lies.  Document nothing and there will certainly be
> complaints.  Why worry about losers who are in essence complaining
> that the documentation is *too* complete?

All I'm asking is a leading paragraph something like this:

"""While the Python developers do their best to make every subsequent
release backwards compatible with previous releases, in a system of
this complexity, sometimes incompatibilities in odd corners of the
language are unavoidable.  While we expect that these will affect only
a small minority of Python users, we document them here for
completeness."""

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)