Attack a sacred Python Cow

[Terry Reedy]

Nikolaus Rath wrote:
> Bruno Desthuilliers <bdesth.quelquechose at free.quelquepart.fr> writes:
>> Nikolaus Rath a écrit :

>>> Thats true. But out of curiosity: why is changing the interpreter such
>>> a bad thing? (If we suppose for now that the change itself is a good
>>> idea).
>> Because it would very seriously break a *lot* of code ?
> 
> Well, Python 3 will break lots of code anyway, won't it?

Each code breaking change was evaluated as a cost against the long-term 
net benefits.  Many are removals that were announced years ago and which 
will not break code written with an eye to the future.  An example is 
the removal of 'apply', which was replace with '*iterable' years ago.

Some proposed changes, were rejected only because they would break too 
much code, or because automatic fixed would not be easy.  For these 
reasons, the core Python syntax is pretty much untouched.  Attribute 
lookup is part of core syntax.