[Python-Dev] Maintenance burden of str.swapcase (original) (raw)

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Tue Sep 6 22:36:47 CEST 2011

Which applications? I'm not sure the number of applications using str.swapcase gets even as high as ten.

I think this is what people underestimate. I can't name applications either - but that doesn't mean they don't exist. I'm deeply convinced that the majority of Python code (and I mean large majority) is unpublished.

I expect thousands of uses world-wide.

We still have our standard deprecation policy that we can follow in Python 3. We don't have to wait until Python 4 to remove things.

That's true. However, part of the deprecation procedure is also that there should be a rationale for removing it. In the past, things have been removed that had been superseded with something new, or things that had been flawed in their design so that fixing it wasn't really possible, or that did indeed cause ongoing maintenance effort for a minority of users (such as the support for little-used platforms).

None if these motivations hold for str.swapcase, and I think the "other implementations will have to implement it" is not sufficient motivation. If the other implementations believe that the feature is truly useless and also not used, they just can declare it a deliberate deviation from CPython, and refuse to implement it.

If I had to pick a truly useless feature, I'd kill complex numbers, not str.swapcase.

Regards, Martin

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