[Python-Dev] (no subject) (original) (raw)

Moore, Paul Paul.Moore@atosorigin.com
Thu, 5 Dec 2002 14:43:23 -0000

> Guido van Rossum wrote: >=20 > > Why don't you care about the backwards incompatibilities? >=20 > Because it's addressed by using a str subclass. =20 Which strikes me as an ugly hack. :-(

And it's dangerous. Code which assumes strings on sys.path and modifies sys.path will fail silently rather than giving an error.

Example (not too realistic, I admit):

sys.path =3D [ os.path.abspath(d) for d in sys.path ]

which collapses string subclasses to strings :-(

Paul.