On Apr 16, 12:52 pm, Aaron Watters <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Apr 16, 2:33 pm, Rhamphoryncus <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > The point is, you can't have it both ways. Either you evolve the > > language and break things, or you keep it static and nothing breaks. > > I disagree. You can add lots of cool > stuff without breaking the existing code base, mostly. > For example the minor changes to the way ints will work will > effect almost no programs.
What changes are minor though? Eliminating old-style classes should be minor, but I'm not sure it is. Applications & libraries have a way of depending on the most obscure details - even if trivially fixed, it still requires a fix. Consider "as" becoming a keyword, or True and False. In hindsight, it would have been better to add future imports for unicode literals and print-as-a-function back in 2.5. I guess the time machine was out of service. 2.6 will have to do (and that's what it's for.) I'm personally not too worried about the syntax changes though, they're superficial(!). What I am worried about is the library APIs changing to use unicode instead of bytes. It's not something you could do incrementally without providing two of every lib or two of every API - having .write() and .writeex() would suck. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list