[Python-Dev] Re: Stability and change (original) (raw)

Gordon McMillan gmcm@hypernet.com
Sun, 7 Apr 2002 16:38:18 -0400

On 7 Apr 2002 at 10:20, Guido van Rossum wrote:

[Gordon] > I keep a fairly large body of code working with > 1.5.2 onwards.

[Guido]

Interesting. Two questions.

(1) Got any details on which changes caused the most pain?

Tightening up functions which allowed two params where a tuple was correct. The changes to ConfigParser bit me hard; I think a couple other std lib changes got me, too.

In many cases my 1.5.2 code ended up better, so the urge to whine is over pretty quickly.

In a broader sense, Unicode is by far the most disruptive change. My excuses for ignoring the damn stuff are disappearing.

(2) Was the pain worth it, or would you prefer we'd spent more time on being more backwards compatible?

I don't have more than a muted grumble about backwards compatibility. Where I end up with checking the version, it's to make use of a new feature, not keep old code working.

Recompiling all those extensions is the biggest pain.

> (FWIW, the hardest post 1.5.2 feature for me > to do without is augmented assignment.)

Since you're also a C programmer (I believe), I'm not surprised.

Well, the other side of that coin is that I'm still only +0 on list comprehensions and -0 on lexical scoping :-).

-- Gordon http://www.mcmillan-inc.com/