Python 1.6 alpha 1 released

[Patrick Phalen]

[Vladimir Ulogov, on Fri, 31 Mar 2000]
:: Is it possible to keep old notation ? I'm understand (according you past
:: mail about parameters of the connect) this may be not what you has have in
:: mind, but we do use this notation "a lot" and for us it will means to
:: create workaround for socket.connect function. It's inconvinient. In
:: general, I'm thinknig the socket.connect(Host, Port) looks prettier :))
:: than socket.connect((Host, Port))

[and]

[Bjorn Pettersen, on Fri, 31 Mar 2000]
:: > > A quick look shows that this breaks all the network scripts I have
:: > > installed (at least the ones that I found, undoubtedly there are many
:: > > more).  Because of this I will put any upgrade plans on hold.
<snip>
:: Of course not.  And now I'm not planning to upgrade to 1.6 final either
:: (which would be in about two months according to the web page). It looks
:: like the only significant new feature is Unicode strings, and while it's
:: a great addition to the language, it's not somehting I need so I can
:: afford to hold off.


Well, these two posts have scratching my head. What sort of
environment are you two (Vladimir & Bjorn) working in that makes it
seem so onerous to fix your sock.connect() syntax (considering that
you literally have months to prepare for it)?

After all, this isn't like the multi-argument append issue, which defies
even Tim Peters' estimable skills with regular expressions to arrive at
a surefire "nanny" treatment. We're just talking about a simple string
replacement here!

In my own case, I administer around 12 servers, geographically
dispersed around the U.S, plus the workstations in my office. All have
various Python scripts running on them. Long ago, I hacked a simple
string replacement script in Python, which takes a directory and two
strings as arguments and which walks that directory tree replacing one
string with the other. I have this script on all 12 servers, since I use
it all the time.

Now, I expect it will take me all of 15-20 minutes, total, to
find and "fix" any such problems on these 12 servers. I know I'll need
to also fix some other situations where long int "L" is manually
truncated. Big deal. Since I have 2-3 months warning on this, I feel
fairly confident I am up to this challenge. In fact, I expect it
will take me less time to fix sock.connect() than to reply to your
posts. ;-)

I must be missing something. Is your situation somehow much more
complex than that? If so, I'd be curious to know how and why.

And as for asking Guido to change his mind ... heh, that was a little
joke, right?