[Python-3000] Cross-compatibility with 2.6 and 3.0 (original) (raw)

Giovanni Bajo rasky at develer.com
Fri Mar 9 01:06:24 CET 2007

On 09/03/2007 0.18, Talin wrote:

Guido's Py3K presentation of February 14th (available on Google Video at this URL: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1189446823303316785) contains the following statement:

"It is unlikely that you will be able to write both code that is both valid Python 2.6 source code and valid Python 3.0 source code". This seems like a big problem to me: From a systems management approach, its much easier to migrate a system if you can take a gradualist approach rather than being forced to maintain two versions of the code in parallel. [...]

This was already discussed ad libitum: the point is that you will be able to write and maintain a valid Python 2.6 source code which can be automatically converted to valid Python 3.0 source code with the 2to3 refactoring tool. This is meant to be a good enough compromise.

[ Of course, not every Python 2.6 valid program can be converted with 2to3, but the goal is making people able to "adjust" their 2.6 source code up to the point that it works with 2to3 ]

Giovanni Bajo

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