[Python-Dev] (Looking for) A Retrospective on the Move to Python 3

[Victor Stinner]

2018-04-28 3:33 GMT+02:00 Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz>:
> Victor Stinner wrote:
>>
>> In my opinion, the largest failure of Python 3 is that we failed to
>> provide a smooth and *slow* transition from Python 2 and Python 3.
>
> Although for some things, such as handling of non-ascii text, it's
> hard to see how a smooth transition *could* have been achieved.
> Is it a failure if we don't succeed in doing the impossible?

Technically, it is easy to add an option to Python 2 to raise an
exception on str+unicode and str < unicode.

You can imagine the same option or a different one to really get the
bytes type of Python 3 (b'abc'[0] returns 97).

Such option would ease a lot to port code to Python 3, since you only
have to care of bytes vs Unicode issue. You don't have to worry about
the looooong list of other Python 3 changes (like the new stdlib
names...).

Note: Python 3 Unicode is stricter in other ways, like UTF-8 reject
lone surrogates. But I don't think that it matters for most users, and
technically it would also be possible to add an option to Python 2 to
get the new behaviour.

Moreover, Python 2 *already* has an option to switch to the new division mode:

$ python2 -Q new -c 'print(1/2)'
0.5

I'm proposing that a backward incompatible change must always be
prepared in the previous release.

Victor