[Python-Dev] Python 3 design principles (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Thu Sep 1 17:02:02 CEST 2005

On 9/1/05, Nick Craig-Wood <nick at craig-wood.com> wrote:

I'm all for removing the cruft in python 3, and giving it a bit of a spring clean, but please, please don't make it feel like a different language otherwise the users will be deserting in droves (no-one likes to be told that they've been using the wrong language for all these years).

IMO it won't feel like a different language; syntactically, the most far-fetched change is probably dropping the print statement (on which I just opened a new thread).

If come python 3, there is a 99% accurate program which can turn your python 2.x into python 3 code, then that would ease the transition greatly.

That might not be so easy given the desire to change most list-returning functions and methods into iterator-returning ones. This means that most places where you use keys() your code will still run, but some places you'll have to write list(d.keys()). How is the translator going to know? Worse, there's a common idiom:

L = D.keys() L.sort()

that should be replaced by

L = sorted(D)

how is the translator going to recognize that (given that there are all sorts of variations)?

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

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list