[Python-Dev] Counting collisions for the win

[Terry Reedy]

On 1/20/2012 2:51 PM, Donald Stufft wrote:

> I think the counting collision is at best a bandaid and not a proper fix
> stemmed from a desire to not break existing applications on a bugfix
> release ...

My opinion of counting is better than yours, but even conceding the 
theoretical, purity argument, our release process is practical as well. 
There have been a few occasions when fixes to bugs in our code have been 
delayed from a bugfix release to the next feature release -- because the 
fix would break too much code depending on the bug.

Some years ago there was a proposal that we should deliberately tweak 
hash() to break 'buggy' code that depended on it not changing. This 
never happened. So it has been left de facto constant, to the extent it 
is, for some years.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy