[Python-Dev] Issue 14417: consequences of new dict runtime error

[Guido van Rossum]

On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 12:13 PM, Etienne Robillard
<animelovin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 03/30/2012 03:02 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:
>>
>> Hey Etienne, I am honestly trying to understand your contribution but
>> you seem to have started a discussion about free speech. Trust me that
>> we don't mind your contributions, we're just trying to understand what
>> you're saying, and the free speech discussion isn't helping with that.
>
>
> I agree.
>
>
>> So if you have a comment on the dict mutation problem, please say so.
>
>
> OK.
>
>
>> If you need help understanding the problem, python-dev is not the
>> place to ask questions; you could ask on the bug, or on the
>> core-mentorship list as Nick suggested. But please stop bringing up
>> free speech, that's not an issue.
>
>
> Guido, thanks for the wisdom and clarity of your reasoning. I really
> appreciate a positive attitude towards questioning not so obvious problems.
>
> So far I was only attempting to verify whether this is related to PEP-416 or
> not. If this is indeed related PEP 416, then I must obviously attest that I
> must still understand why a immutable dict would prevent this bug or not...

It's not related to PEP 416 (which was rejected). Please refer to
http://bugs.python.org/issue14417 for the issue being discussed.

> Either ways, I fail to see where this is OT or should be discussed on a more
> obscur forum than python-dev. :-)

We need to keep that list clear for important discussions. It is the
only channel that the core Python developers have. If it has too much
noise people will stop reading it and it stops functioning. Hence, we
try to keep questions from newbies to a minimum -- there are other
places where we welcome such questions though.

So, once more, if you don't understand the issue and cannot figure it
out by reading up, please ask somewhere else (or just accept that you
don't have anything to contribute to this particular issue). This
includes explaining basic terms like "mutate". On the other hand, if
you *do* understand the problem, by all means let us know what you
think of the question at hand (whether the change referred to in the
issue is going to break people's code or not). We don't need more
speculation though; that's how we got here in the first place (my
speculation that it's not going to be an issue vs. RDM's speculation
that it's going to cause widespread havoc :-).

I hope you understand.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)