[Python-Dev] Python 4: don't remove anything, don't break backward compatibility

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Paul Moore writes:

 > I understand that - my concern is that people reading such comments
 > out of context might not realise this ("after all, that was what
 > Python 3000 meant, then you went and implemented it").

Sure, but why worry about it?  The important part of "willful
ignorance" is the "willful".  We can't "fix" people who are willing to
accept that crap -- they'll find some other crap to believe.

Python 3 already has undeniable cruft (some Python 2 compatibility
stuff) and arguably some things that could have been done better but
can't really be changed in Python 3 (see the backtrace thread).
Python makes strong promises that those things will *not* become
compatibility breaks within 3.x, even if we're pretty confident that
"nobody" is using them any more, and especially not when we now just
think we could have done a better job on some feature.  The flip side
of that is that Python 4000 is going to be mentioned as the
appropriate time for changing them.

If that confuses people, well, we can just unconfuse them (if that's
OK with them...).