[Python-Dev] Fixing zipfile.BadZipfile to zipfile.BadZipFile

Éric Araujo merwok at netwok.org
Wed Oct 27 18:26:26 CEST 2010


[Reply received off-list quoted here]

Le 18/10/2010 09:25, Boštjan Mejak a écrit :
> Shoot. Well, too bad. I thought Python is all about readability, but I think
> you developers don't take it very seriously.

Readability has to be balanced with other important things:
maintainability, discoverability, compatibility, rapidity and other
things ending in -ity.  I’m personally glad that readability gets a huge
place in the language definition itself (no braces, standard
indentation), I follow 98 % of PEP 8 where I can, and have learned to
accept that sometimes, a piece of code in the standard lib won’t get
more readable.  Still beats some languages that I won’t name because
dissing Java is too easy.  <wink>

> If I was a developer, I would
> certainly go to the trouble of all the rewrittes of
> package/module/class/method/function names that do not comply to PEP 8 and
> have them done by the time the first sub-version of Python 3 would be
> released.

You are free to break compat in your code but it python-dev has a duty
to its users.  Renames in threading have been deemed a good thing,
renames in unittest not.  You can read the python-3000 archives to get
an idea of the years of work and thousands of messages that went into
py3k.  At some point, a release had to be done.  Now that there is a
stable release in the 3.x line, compatibility rules apply.

Practicality beats purity; now is better than never.

Regards



More information about the Python-Dev mailing list