Does Python really follow its philosophy of "Readability counts"?

[Rhamphoryncus]

On Jan 22, 7:48 pm, Terry Reedy <tjre... at udel.edu> wrote:
> Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>
> > Here's a thought experiment for you. You've suggested that the values
> > returned by cmp() are allowed to change "at whim". Okay, let's do it:
> > make a patch that changes cmp() to return -17, 0 or 53, and promise to
> > support it for at least three years. Try to get it accepted on python-
> > dev. What do you expect they will say?
>
> > My money is on them saying "No, this will pointlessly break code for no
> > good reason. Rejected."
>
> I have occasionally thought that things documented to possibly change
> *should* be changed just to expose the *bug* of depending on them not
> changing.  Or maybe, the doc should be changed.

Aye.  There are places where we're deliberately open, but this isn't
one of them.  I think this is just a C-ism and the docs should be more
specific.

Or finish ripping it out in 3.x ;)