[Python-Dev] Re: No new features

[Aahz]

On Wed, Mar 09, 2005, Michael Hudson wrote:
>
> No no no!  The point of what Anthony is saying, as I read it, is that
> experience suggests it is exactly this sort of change that should be
> avoided.  Consider the case of Mac OS X 10.2 which came with Python
> 2.2.0: this was pretty broken anyway because of some apple snafus but
> it was made even more useless by the fact that people out in the wild
> were writing code for 2.2.1 and using True/False/bool.  Going from
> 2.x.y to 2.x.y+1 shouldn't break anything, going from 2.x.y+1 to 2.x.y
> shouldn't break anything that doesn't whack into a bug in 2.x.y -- and
> "not having bool" isn't a bug in this sense.

Yes, exactly.  That's why I wrote PEP 6 in the first place, and
experience has only led to tightening things up further.  The specific
example of 2.2.1 and bool is even worse than you're noting, because
2.3's bool works a bit differently, so you have to actually code for
three different problems in two major versions.  Sehr schlecht.
-- 
Aahz (aahz at pythoncraft.com)           <*>         http://www.pythoncraft.com/

"The joy of coding Python should be in seeing short, concise, readable
classes that express a lot of action in a small amount of clear code -- 
not in reams of trivial code that bores the reader to death."  --GvR