Should __future__ statements ever be phased out?

[Paul Prescod]

Hamish Lawson wrote:
> 
> ... However one
> day I give my program to a friend who (unknown to me) is still running
> Python 2.1. When he runs my program any print statements in it will
> behave differently from what I intended, but without any warning.

I see only two solutions to the problem you describe:

 1. Never make backwards incompatible changes

 2. Always have a version declaration or feature declaration at the top
of Python programs.

You already have the ability to implement 2 if you are paranoid. You can
check sys.version_info in your code.

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