Raymond Hettinger wrote:
From: "Guido van Rossum" <gu...@python.org>
On the one hand I understand that those folks want a stable target. On
the other hand I think they would prefer to find out sooner rather
than later they're using stuff they shouldn't be using any more. It's
a delicate balance for sure, and I certainly don't want to open the
floodgates here, or rebrand 3.1 as 3.0.1 or anything like that. But I
really don't believe that the strictest interpretation of "no new
features" will benefit us for 3.0.1. Perhaps we should decide when to
go back to a more strict interpretation of the rules based on the
uptake of Python 3 compared to Python 2.
That seems like a smart choice to me. Make the fixups as early as
possible,
before there has been significant uptake.
Am reminded of a cautionary tale from The Art of Unix Programming
http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch15s04.html#id2986550 :
"""
No discussion of make(1) would be complete without an acknowledgement
that it includes one of the worst design botches in the history of
Unix. The use of tab characters as a required leader for command lines
associated with a production means that the interpretation of a
makefile can change drastically on the basis of invisible differences
in whitespace.
"Why the tab in column 1? Yacc was new, Lex was brand new. I hadn't
tried either, so I figured this would be a good excuse to learn. After
getting myself snarled up with my first stab at Lex, I just did
something simple with the pattern newline-tab. It worked, it stayed.
And then a few weeks later I had a user population of about a dozen,
most of them friends, and I didn't want to screw up my embedded base.
The rest, sadly, is history." -- Stuart Feldman
"""
I suspect that the use of significant whitespace is too deeply ingrained
in Python for us to change it now - even in Python 3. ;-)
Michael
Raymond
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