PEP0238 lament

[Guido van Rossum]

david at boddie.net (David Boddie) writes:

> It's strange. I don't mind the introduction of default float division
> at some point in the future, despite having to rewrite many of my
> modules with no future-proof, succinct integer division operator to
> hand. However, diplomatic attempts to avoid breakage of legacy code
> appear to have failed. I suspect that the best we can hope for is
> non-silent breakage via compile-time exceptions.

I'm assuming this was aimed at me, so I'll respond.

Suppose that python 3.x would *always* have to be invoked as
"python3".  Would that still break legacy code?  This approach was
used successfully by Perl.

I just don't want to encumber the language itself with version
encrustations.  It offends my sense of elegance in language design.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)