[Python-ideas] Documenting Python warts on Stack Overflow (original) (raw)
Chris Angelico rosuav at gmail.com
Tue Jan 1 23:16:39 CET 2013
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On Wed, Jan 2, 2013 at 8:55 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
The problem is you are listing examples which in your opinion are issues with Python. Other people would have different ideas of what is an issue and what is not. This can't be the right methodology if we want to write a piece of Python docs. Only things which are well-known annoyances can qualify.
My understanding of a "Python wart" is that it's something that cannot be changed without readdressing some fundamental design. For example, Python has decided that indentation and line-endings are significant - that a logical statement ends at end-of-line. Python has further decided that line continuation characters are unnecessary inside parenthesized expressions. Resultant wart: Breaking a massive 'for' loop between its assignment list and its iterable list doesn't work, even though breaking it anywhere else does. (This question came up on python-list a little while ago.) Why should it be an error to break it here, but not there? Why can't I split it like this:
for x,y,z in start_point, continuation_point, end_point : pass
when it's perfectly legal to split it like this:
for ( x,y,z ) in ( start_point, continuation_point, end_point ): pass
Well, because you can't. It's a little odd what you can and can't do, until you understand the underlying system fairly well. It's something that's highly unlikely to change; one of the premises would have to be sacrificed (or at least modified) to achieve it.
Something that could be changed if the devs had enough time is a tracker issue (or a "show me some code" issue - you want to complain, you can do the work to fix it). Something that could be changed, but would break backward compatibility is a prime candidate for future and/or Python 4 (like the change of the division operator - that change introduced its own oddities, some of which may be warts, eg that int/int->float but sqrt(float) !-> complex). A wart is different from both of the above.
ChrisA
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