[Python-Dev] readd u'' literal support in 3.3? (original) (raw)

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Thu Dec 8 22:27:06 CET 2011

This is not a comment on the success of py3, but rather the persistence of old versions of things. Even assuming an awesomely optimistic schedule for py3k migrations, even assuming that everything on PyPI supports Py3 by the end of 2013, consider that all around the world, every day, new code is still being written in FORTRAN.

While this is true for FORTRAN, it is not for Python 1.5: no new Python 1.5 code is written around the world, at least not every day. Also for FORTRAN, new code that is written every day likely isn't FORTRAN 66, but more likely FORTRAN 90 or newer.

The reason for that is that FORTRAN just isn't an obsolete language, by any means, else people wouldn't bother producing new versions of it, porting compilers to new processors, and so on. Contrast this to Python 1, and soon Python 2, which actually is obsolete (just as FORTRAN 66 is obsolete).

Much of it is being in FORTRAN 77

Can you prove this? I trust that existing code is being maintained in FORTRAN 77. For new code, I'm skeptical.

There are plenty of proprietary Python 2 systems which exist today for which there will not be a budget for a Python 3 migration this decade.

And people using it can happily continue to use Python 2. If they don't have a need to port their code to Python 3, they are not concerned by whether you use a u prefix for strings in Python 3 or not.

Regards, Martin

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