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

[Etienne Robillard]

On 03/30/2012 03:27 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> 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.

No, not really. Anyways, I guess I'll have to further dig down why is
PEP-416 is really important to Python and why it was likewise rejected, 
supposing I confused the pep 416 and issue 14417 along the way.. :-)

CHeers,

Etienne