[Python-ideas] Make py.exe default to Python 3

[Andrew Barnert]

On Mar 15, 2016, at 04:25, Oscar Benjamin <oscar.j.benjamin at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> On 15 March 2016 at 04:47, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> On the *nix side of things, the long term objective is to get "python"
>> to a point of being usable for the latter case, but there's still a
>> lot of other things to be done before that's a realistic option (e.g.
>> migrating system packages over to using their own dedicated binary or
>> symlink, so "python" can be switched to point to something else
>> without affecting system services).
> 
> Well that would initially improve things but what happens when python
> 4 comes around?

Nothing. It'll be called just "python" on both platforms. Just like when Python 2.0 came out, it was just called "python", not "python2", and was no more incompatible with 1.5 than 1.5 had been with 1.4. Python 3 was a once-in-a-lifetime, or at least once-in-a-generation, thing, not a plan to overhaul everything once/decade. (At least that's the impression I get from the PEPs, Guido's blogs, other dev's blogs, and the mailing lists.) The only way I can imagine Python 4.0 being incompatible is 3.9 is followed by 3.10 and somewhere in the distant future the memory of the 2.5->3.0 transition has faded (or the *nix environment has changed) to the point where a similar 3.14->4.0 seems like a good idea.