[Python-Dev] The bytes type

[James Y Knight]

On Jan 17, 2007, at 6:22 PM, Anthony Baxter wrote:

> On Wednesday 17 January 2007 05:52, James Y Knight wrote:
>> Yes, this is it. As a refinement: if the New Way can easily be
>> backported to 2.5,
>
> Um - 2.5 is _done_. Released. In maintenance mode. New features will
> not be getting backported to a 2.5.x release.

Sorry if I was unclear there. I was not suggesting doing feature  
changes to 2.5, of course.

I meant backported such that they will _run_ on 2.5. And distributed  
as a private module to go along with my code. This was doable for  
many advancements in the 2.X series. For example, I could update my  
code to use heapq and UserDict.DictMixin (which were added in py  
2.3), even though it still ran on 2.2, by including a copy of those  
which were used if you're running 2.2. So code could be written to  
use a couple new features even though it runs on the old python. This  
is, of course, only useful if the things you want to backport are  
very small. Otherwise, you might as well just include a copy of all  
of Python. :)

But this is moot, anyhow, as it has been decreed that it will not be  
a goal to enable people to write code that runs on both 2.5 and 3.0.

James