On 28.7.2018 07:27, Tim Peters wrote:
[David Mertz]
> I often use doctests to verify APIs and behaviors when I update code. I
> know I'm in a minority and most developers slightly disparage doctests.
[Steven D'Aprano]
I don't know why you think that "most developers" disparage doctests.
Perhaps they're the same ones who think that "read the source" is all
the documentation anyone needs.
Or ones who aren't happy unless they can demonstrate their mastery of a
convoluted class hierarchy with hundreds of methods to memorize. Or
unless they're Guido! He was never fond of doctest either.
I know I don't. I love them. Tim Peters loves them (he should, he wrote
the module) and if its good enough for Uncle Timmy then anyone who
disparages them better have a damn good reason.
Nope! They don't need any reason at all. I don't mind :-)
It was a sneaky, although minor, purpose of doctest to raise the bar for
making gratuitous changes to Python's output. Developers have
approximately no appreciation for how off-putting it can be for users to
struggle with docs showing output they don't actually see. Is the
installation buggy? Did they type something wrong? Was the doc author
just making stuff up? Etc. "Something's wrong here, but I don't know
what" is not a happy experience :-(
So I always count it as a Good Thing when someone points out "but
doctests will break". _That_ developers can understand. It's a proxy
for the real costs of making gratuitous changes, which are pretty much
invisible to developers.
Not that it should drive a decision - but it should be counted as _a_ cost.
...
I think we'd need to ask on Python-Dev to be sure, but my understanding
is that backwards compatibility guarantees for reprs are weaker than
those for regular APIs but stronger than those for error messages.
That sounds about right to me. The docs for doctest already point out
that relying on reprs is dubious in various cases, so if someone is
relying on the repr of OrderedDict in their doctests they presumably
care about the repr more than the semantics. Or they were just confused ;-)
Note that there were coupl repr changes in 3.7 as well:
repr for BaseException has changed to not include the trailing comma.
Most exceptions are affected by this change. (Contributed by Serhiy
Storchaka in bpo-30399.)
repr for datetime.timedelta has changed to include the keyword arguments
in the output. (Contributed by Utkarsh Upadhyay in bpo-30302.)
https://docs.python.org/3.7/whatsnew/3.7.html#changes-in-the-python-api
In any case, since OrderedDict seems to be viewed as a legacy feature
now, making any change to it is an odd idea on the face of it.
As far as I understood the discussions on python-dev, it is not viewed
as legacy feature by everybody. At least when dicts with different order
(otherwise the same) remain equal. I don't see that changing (it would
be very backwards incompatible), hence I think OrderedDict still has
it's place (far from legacy).
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2018-July/154766.html
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Miro Hrončok
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Phone: +420777974800
IRC: mhroncok
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