[Python-Dev] First shot at some_set.get() (original) (raw)

Steven D'Aprano steve at pearwood.info
Sat Oct 24 03:48:09 CEST 2009

On Fri, 23 Oct 2009 11:47:22 pm Nick Coghlan wrote:

Yuvgoog Greenle wrote: > On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 1:09 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote: >> Is there any point? Even if accepted, it's too late to make it >> into 3.1, and with the overwhelming approval for a moratorium on >> changes to built-ins, it is likely to just sit in the tracker, >> forgotten, until 2013 or later. How likely is it that the patch >> will still be applicable? > > +1 on throwing it away completely even if it's a good idea. I > suggest Willi go invent a new language (and hope for it to become > popular :-) if he wants to experiment.

Careful folks - these kinds of throwaway comments may be clearly tongue in cheek for anyone following the moratorium discussion on python-ideas, but will be justifiably confusing to anyone else, especially newcomers.

I'm not being tongue-in-cheek or sarcastic. My question was serious -- if there is a moratorium, is there any reason to bother submitting patches for functional changes to built-ins? A lot can change between now and 2013, and I for one wouldn't bother making a patch that I knew wouldn't even be considered for inclusion for four years, and would likely need to be re-done even if it was accepted. Guido has said that the purpose of the moratorium is to discourage changes to the language. If we're discouraging changes, shouldn't we actually discourage them rather than waste people's time and give them false hope by telling them to put them in the tracker?

Nick, you made the comparison with C in another thread. I don't think that the comparison with C is apt, for various reasons, but putting that aside, given that C is so stable, what do they do with suggested changes to the language? Is there a C issue tracker with ten years of accumulated patches, or even proposals, in the queue?

-- Steven D'Aprano

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