Alf P. Steinbach wrote:
I'm responding to the original message by Xah Lee, which is not carried
by my Usenet provider.
* Alan Harris-Reid:
Xah Lee wrote:
Some thoughts about Python 3 Adoption.
Xah Lee, 2010-01-26
Some notes of Wikipedia readings related to Python.
Unladen Swallow, a new project from Google. It is a new python
compiler with the goal of 5 times faster than the de facto standand
implementation CPython. Also note Stackless Python, which is already
been used in some major commercial projects.
Was looking into what's new in Python 3. See:
http://docs.python.org/dev/3.0/whatsnew/3.0.html.
>From a quick reading, i don't really like it. Here's some highlights:
* Print is now a function. Great, much improvement.
Actually not, IMHO. All it does is is to provide incompatibility. They
forgot Ronald Reagan's old maxim: if it don't need fixin', don't fix it.
It was an inconsistency in the language.
BTW, the usual form of the maxim is: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
* Many functions that return lists now returns “Views” or
“Iterators” Instead. A fucking fuck all fucked up shit. A extraneous
“oop engineering” complication. (See: Lambda in Python 3000)
On the contrary, this is a great improvement. It makes no sense to have
to write more code and less readable code for the common efficient case.
And the default, the way that takes 0.5 seconds less to do, does have a
great influence on what people choose, even in elections (Obama's latest
"opt out" proposal is an example that this principle is recognized even
by the President of the United States). When you want an explicit
collection such as a 'list', introducing some overhead for presumably a
good reason, it's as easy as e.g. 'list(range(42))'.
* The cmp() function used in sort is basically gone, users are now
supposed to use the “key” parameter instead. This is a flying-face-
fuck to computer science. This would be the most serious fuckup in
python 3. (See: Sorting in Python and Perl)
I agree. :-)
Probably there must have been some rationale, but to put it bluntly
removing the comparator is more like moronic than pythonic. If the
rationale was efficiency, then a rational solution could be to provide
two sort methods, like 'sort' using direct comparisions and
'custom_sort' using a specified comparator. Come to think of it, that
door is still open, except for the language spec freeze.
It's possible to work around the removal of 'cmp' in various kludgy
ways, but you shouldn't have to "work around" a library sort routine.
Why two sort methods? It would be simpler just to retain the 'cmp'
argument, like it is in Python 2.6, but deprecated.
* Integers by default is long. Great!
Yes, totally agree.
Nothing confuses the newbie or the now-and-then programmer so much as
limited range integers.
Limited range? That hasn't been the case with 'int' for long time!
(It's automatically promoted to long.)
[snip]
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