On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 10:15 PM, r <rt8...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Dec 20, 11:11 pm, walterbyrd <walterb...@iname.com> wrote: >> On Dec 20, 5:05 pm, Roy Smith <r...@panix.com> >> >> > He got really hung up on the % syntax. >> >> I guess it's good to know that there is, at least, one person in the >> world doesn't like the % formatting. As least the move was not >> entirely pointless. >> >> But, you must admit, of all the things people complain about with >> Python, the % formatting is probably one of the least common >> complaints. Complaints about Python's speed seem much more common. >> >> Yet, 3.0 makes the speed worse, and "fixes" a non-problem.
A few points: 1) The new formatting is NOT the reason for the speed slowdown. So this change at least was a no cost change. No cost to interpreter speed, and no cost as it doesn't replace the old sprintf style. Of all the things to complain about in python 3.0, the format method is the silliest. 2) In my experience, major version changes tend to be slower than before. When a lot of things change, especially if very low-level things change, as happened in python 3.0, the new code has not yet went through many years of revision and optimization that the old code has. In my opinion, python 3 was rushed out the door a bit. It could have done with a few more months of optimization and polishing. However, on the other hand, it is going to take so long for python infrastructure to convert to python 3, that an earlier release makes sense, even if it hasn't been excessively polished. The biggest reason for the speed change is the rewritten stdio and unicode-everything. Hopefully this stuff can be improved in future updates. I don't think anyone WANTS cpython to be slower. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list