PEP 238 (revised)

Christian Tanzer tanzer at swing.co.at
Sat Jul 28 11:02:12 EDT 2001


Joshua Macy <l0819m0v0smfm001 at sneakemail.com> wrote:

> Paul Boddie wrote:
> >
> > But possibly the first thing anyone with any investment in the
> > language should be thinking upon starting to read the PEP is: "How on
> > Earth am I going to know what needs changing, and how much time and
> > money am I going to be spending to adapt to this?"
> > 
> 
>   It seems to me that if upon reading the PEP someone thinks "How on
> Earth am I going to know what needs changing?", he is almost guaranteed
> to have bugs in his code that relate to the very issue that the PEP
> addresses.  How could he not, since he's obviously never thought about
> it before?

That's a very arrogant statement to make.

I know that my code contains both floor division and real division.
Trust me, that I knew what I did when I programmed them.

And I can use Skip Montanaro's division finder to spot many places in
need of checking. Yet I also know that my applications contain quite a
number of strings which are feed to eval/exec at run-time. These are
much harder to identify.

And then there's code I don't even know about. Some of it written by
me and used by others. Some of it written by God-knows-who and fed as
a script to one of my applications. Do you have a recipe for this one,
too? 

> Someone who thinks this way should be thanking his lucky stars that if
> the PEP is implemented the language is going to grow the machinery in
> the near term to help him identify the bugs (warnings and possibly
> tools), write code that's not subject to the bugs (using / and //
> appropriately) and the incentive (Python 3.0) to attack the problem in
> the next few years.

Maybe we should break some more operators and thereby improve the code
out there even more?

Maybe-changing-the-meaning-of-some-keywords-would-be-even-more-beneficial-ly
y'rs, 

-- 
Christian Tanzer                                         tanzer at swing.co.at
Glasauergasse 32                                       Tel: +43 1 876 62 36
A-1130 Vienna, Austria                                 Fax: +43 1 877 66 92





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