[Python-Dev] Bring new features to older python versions (original) (raw)

Toshio Kuratomi a.badger at gmail.com
Tue Oct 11 18:14:12 CEST 2011

On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 01:49:43PM +0100, Michael Foord wrote:

On 10/10/2011 21:21, Giampaolo Rodolà wrote: > >Toshio Kuratomi<a.badger at gmail.com> wrote: >>I have a need to support a small amount of code as far back as python-2.3 >>I don't suppose you're interested in that as well? ;-) >I'm still not sure; 2.3 version is way too old (it doesn't even have >decorators). >It might make sense only in case the lib gets widely used, which I doubt. >Personally, at some point I deliberately dropped support for 2.3 from >all of my code/lib, mainly because I couldn't use decorators. so I >don't have a real need to do this.

Yes, rewriting code from Python 2.7 to support Python 2.3 (pre-decorators) is a real nuisance. In my projects I'm currently supporting Python 2.4+. I'll probably drop support for Python 2.4 soon which will allow for the use of the with statement. So actually, decorators aren't a big deal when thinking about porting a limited set of code to python-2.3. decorators are simply syntactic sugar after all, so it's only a one-line change::

@cache() def function(arg): # do_expensive_something return result

becomes::

def function(arg): # do_expensiv_something return result function = cache(function)

This may not be the preferred manner to write decorators but it's fairly straightforward and easy to remember compared to, say, porting away from the with statement.

That said, this was in the nature of hopeful, finger crossing, not really expecting that I'd get someone else to commit to this as a limitation than a, "this is not worthwhile unless you go back to python-2.3". I only have to bear this burden until February 29 and believe me, I'm anxiously awaiting that day :-)

-Toshio -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 198 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20111011/22de1791/attachment.pgp>

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list