[Python-Dev] Backport new float repr to Python 2.7?

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 3:48 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:


> I'm -0 -- mostly because of the 3rd party doctests and perhaps also
> because I'd like 3.x to have some carrots. (I've heard from at least
> one author who is very happy with 3.x for the next edition of his
> "programming for beginners" book.)
>

This reasoning definitely makes sense to me; with all the
dependency-migration issues 3.x could definitely use some carrots.  However,
I don't think I agree with it, because this doesn't feel like a big new
feature, just some behavior which has changed.  The carrots I'm interested
in as a user are new possibilties, like new standard library features, a
better debugger/profiler, or everybody's favorate bugaboo, multicore
parallelism.  (Although, to be fair, the removal of old-style classes
qualifies.)

I'd much rather have my doctests and float-repr'ing code break on 2.7 so I
can deal with it as part of a minor-version upgrade than have it break on
3.x and have to deal with this at the same time as the unicode->str
explosion.  It feels like a backport of this behavior would make the 2->3
transition itself a little easier.
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