[Python-Dev] Python 3 design principles

[Guido van Rossum]

On 9/1/05, Nick Craig-Wood <nick at craig-wood.com> wrote:
> I'm all for removing the cruft in python 3, and giving it a bit of a
> spring clean, but please, please don't make it feel like a different
> language otherwise the users will be deserting in droves (no-one likes
> to be told that they've been using the wrong language for all these
> years).

IMO it won't feel like a different language; syntactically, the most
far-fetched change is probably dropping the print statement (on which
I just opened a new thread).

> If come python 3, there is a 99% accurate program which can turn your
> python 2.x into python 3 code, then that would ease the transition
> greatly.

That might not be so easy given the desire to change most
list-returning functions and methods into iterator-returning ones.
This means that *most* places where you use keys() your code will
still run, but *some* places you'll have to write list(d.keys()). How
is the translator going to know? Worse, there's a common idiom:

  L = D.keys()
  L.sort()

that should be replaced by

  L = sorted(D)

how is the translator going to recognize that (given that there are
all sorts of variations)?

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