[Python-Dev] PEP-317

[Aahz]

On Mon, Jun 09, 2003, Michael Hudson wrote:
> Aahz <aahz@pythoncraft.com> writes:
>> On Mon, Jun 09, 2003, Steven Taschuk wrote:
>>> Quoth Brett C.:
>>>>
>>>> I am +1 on deprecating string exceptions for Python 3.
>>> 
>>> PEP 317 actually proposes formally deprecating them in 2.4, and
>>> eliminating them entirely in 3.0.  Are you +1 on that?
>>
>> Given how deeply embedded string exceptions are in Python, 
> 
> How deep is that?  'python -X' went away, causing no pain at all as
> far as I could tell.

Well, I was still casually using string exceptions up until about a year
ago, and I think I'm not the only one.  There's probably lots of pre-2.0
code still running in the wild with string exceptions.

>> I believe that we cannot afford to issue a DeprecationWarning until
>> we start doing the same for integer division.
> 
> $ python -E -Wall
> Python 2.3b1+ (#1, May  6 2003, 18:00:11) 
> [GCC 2.96 20000731 (Red Hat Linux 7.2 2.96-112.7.2)] on linux2
> Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>> raise "hello"
> __main__:1: PendingDeprecationWarning: raising a string exception is deprecated
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
> hello
> 
> We don't seem to do that for integer division yet.

Correct.  Note that I said "Deprecation", not "PendingDeprecation".  If
we're just going to use PendingDeprecation, I'm fine with that in 2.4.
Seems to me that both integers and string exceptions require
line-by-line analysis to correct, and I think it's unfair to shove
people to do that work twice.
-- 
Aahz (aahz@pythoncraft.com)           <*>         http://www.pythoncraft.com/

"If you don't know what your program is supposed to do, you'd better not
start writing it."  --Dijkstra