[Python-Dev] Issue 2986: difflib.SequenceMatcher is partly broken

[Nick Coghlan]

On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 6:40 AM, Tim Peters <tim.peters at gmail.com> wrote:
> The call in question here is the constructor (__init__), so there's no
> real difference between "on the object" and "per call" in this case.

You're right, I was misremembering how SequenceMatcher works.

Terry's summary of the situation seems correct to me - adding a new
flag to the constructor signature would mean we're taking a silent
failure ("the heuristic makes my code give the wrong answer on 2.7.0")
and making it a noisy failure ("my code needs to be able to turn the
heuristic off to get the right answer, so it will fail noisily on
2.7.0").

That's a far cry from the True/False mistake.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia