[Python-Dev] User's complaints (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Thu Jul 13 06:46:21 CEST 2006

On 7/12/06, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:

On 7/12/06, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

> On 7/12/06, Armin Rigo <arigo at tunes.org> wrote: > > I guess I'm going to side with Greg Black on his blog entry. > > I seem to recall that that particular one wass not an accidental > bug. I believe I fell over exactly the problem that Greg Black > complained about (or almost the same; maybe my problem was setting the > month and day to zero and formatting only the time :-) and tried to > convince the author to change it; but was told that the new behavior > was never documented and that the new behavior was somehow better; and > I didn't fight it further then. Do I remember this correctly? Does > anybody else recall?

My recollection is that we found a way to cause a crash if improper values were used. We never said 0s were allowed in the docs and that it could mask bugs if you did use them and we supported them ( e.g., setting 0 for January instead of 1 if you were thinking in terms of indexing at the time). So we said that values should be within the proper range and not above or below them. The python-dev Summary coverage can be found at http://www.python.org/dev/summary/2004-02-012004-02-29/#time-strftime-now-checks-its-argument-s-bounds

Thanks for confirming memory! So it was an intentional regression; "bugs happen" doesn't apply in this case. And an unfortunate regression at that -- not because one guy writes a silly blog entry about it, but because it breaks real code -- undocumented be damned.

Are we going to fix it, without allowing those crashes again?

-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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