[Python-Dev] (Looking for) A Retrospective on the Move to Python 3 (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Thu May 17 10:44:57 EDT 2018

On 14 May 2018 at 12:34, Chris Barker via Python-Dev <python-dev at python.org> wrote:

On Sat, May 12, 2018 at 8:14 AM, Skip Montanaro <skip.montanaro at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have found 2to3 conversion to be remarkably easy and painless.

> And the whole Unicode thing is much easier. Another point here: between 3.0 and 3.6 (.5?) -- py3 grew a lot of minor features that made it easier to write py2/py3 compatible code. u"string", b'bytes %i' % something -- and when where the various future imports made available? If these had been in place in 3.0, the whole process would have been easier :-(

The future imports were already there in 2.6/3.0.

The other ones weren't there initially because we didn't know which things we were tempted to add back because they were actually useful, and which ones we just thought we wanted because we were used to the way the Python 2 text model worked (or failed to work, as the case may be). (The build time source code translation step was also far less effective than we hoped it was going to be, since we completely failed to account for the problem of mapping tracebacks for converted code back to the original pre-translation code)

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan at gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20180517/38cba18c/attachment.html>

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