subject:"Should non\-security 2.7 bugs be fixed\?"

Chris Angelico ros...@gmail.com:

 Fortunately, we don't need to completely understand it. New Horizons
 reached Pluto right on time after a decade of flight that involved
 taking a left turn at Jupiter... we can predict exactly what angle to
 fire the rockets at in order to get where we want to go, even without
 knowing how that gravity yank works.

 Practicality beats purity?

Engineer!

At the time I was in college I heard topology was very fashionable among
mathematicians. That was because it was one of the last remaining
research topics that didn't yet have an application.


Marko
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Re: OT Re: Math-embarrassment results in CS [was: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

2015-07-23 Thread Grant Edwards

On 2015-07-23, Marko Rauhamaa ma...@pacujo.net wrote:
 Chris Angelico ros...@gmail.com:

 Fortunately, we don't need to completely understand it. New Horizons
 reached Pluto right on time after a decade of flight that involved
 taking a left turn at Jupiter... we can predict exactly what angle to
 fire the rockets at in order to get where we want to go, even without
 knowing how that gravity yank works.

 Practicality beats purity?

 Engineer!

 At the time I was in college I heard topology was very fashionable among
 mathematicians. That was because it was one of the last remaining
 research topics that didn't yet have an application.

You can always pick out the topologist at a conference: he's the one
trying to dunk his coffee cup in his doughnut.

[Hey, how often do you get to use a topology  joke.]

--
Grant

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Re: OT Re: Math-embarrassment results in CS [was: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

2015-07-23 Thread Chris Angelico

On Fri, Jul 24, 2015 at 7:59 AM, Marko Rauhamaa ma...@pacujo.net wrote:
 Laura Creighton l...@openend.se:

 In a message of Fri, 24 Jul 2015 00:29:28 +0300, Marko Rauhamaa writes:
At the time I was in college I heard topology was very fashionable
among mathematicians. That was because it was one of the last
remaining research topics that didn't yet have an application.

 I have a very good freind who is a knot-theorist. (Chad Musick, who
 may have proven something wonderful.) see:
 http://chadmusick.wikidot.com/knots He says there are lots of
 applications for this in the field of circuit board layouts. And most
 mathematicians accept knot-theory as part of topology.

 So topology, too, is lost.

You remind me of the hipster mathematician cook, who burned himself by
calculating pie before it was cool.

ChrisA
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Re: OT Re: Math-embarrassment results in CS [was: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

2015-07-23 Thread MRAB


On 2015-07-23 22:50, Mark Lawrence wrote:

On 23/07/2015 22:29, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:

Chris Angelico ros...@gmail.com:


Fortunately, we don't need to completely understand it. New Horizons
reached Pluto right on time after a decade of flight that involved
taking a left turn at Jupiter... we can predict exactly what angle to
fire the rockets at in order to get where we want to go, even without
knowing how that gravity yank works.

Practicality beats purity?


Engineer!



Heard the one about the three engineers in the car that breaks down?

The chemical engineer suggests that they could have contaminated fuel.
They should try and get a sample and get someone to take it to a lab for
analysis.

The electrical engineer suggests that they check the battery and the
leads for any problems.

The Microsoft engineer suggests that they close all the windows, get out
of the car, get back in the car, open all the windows and see what happens.


And an Apple engineer would suggest buying a new car that runs only on
its manufacturer's brand of fuel. :-)

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Re: OT Re: Math-embarrassment results in CS [was: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

2015-07-23 Thread Laura Creighton

In a message of Thu, 23 Jul 2015 23:01:51 +0100, MRAB writes:

And an Apple engineer would suggest buying a new car that runs only on
its manufacturer's brand of fuel. :-)

Before you do that, read this:
http://teslaclubsweden.se/test-drive-of-a-petrol-car/
(ps, if you can read Swedish, the Swedish version is a little more fun.)

Laura
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Re: OT Re: Math-embarrassment results in CS [was: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

2015-07-23 Thread Mark Lawrence


On 23/07/2015 22:29, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:

Chris Angelico ros...@gmail.com:


Fortunately, we don't need to completely understand it. New Horizons
reached Pluto right on time after a decade of flight that involved
taking a left turn at Jupiter... we can predict exactly what angle to
fire the rockets at in order to get where we want to go, even without
knowing how that gravity yank works.

Practicality beats purity?


Engineer!



Heard the one about the three engineers in the car that breaks down?

The chemical engineer suggests that they could have contaminated fuel. 
They should try and get a sample and get someone to take it to a lab for 
analysis.


The electrical engineer suggests that they check the battery and the 
leads for any problems.


The Microsoft engineer suggests that they close all the windows, get out 
of the car, get back in the car, open all the windows and see what happens.


--
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask
what you can do for our language.

Mark Lawrence

--
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Re: OT Re: Math-embarrassment results in CS [was: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

Ian Kelly ian.g.ke...@gmail.com:

 Gravity existed before Newton, but the *theory* of gravity did not, so
 he composed the theory?

Ironically, gravity is maybe the least well understood phenomenon in
modern physics.


Marko
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Re: OT Re: Math-embarrassment results in CS [was: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

2015-07-23 Thread Mark Lawrence


On 23/07/2015 23:01, MRAB wrote:

On 2015-07-23 22:50, Mark Lawrence wrote:

On 23/07/2015 22:29, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:

Chris Angelico ros...@gmail.com:


Fortunately, we don't need to completely understand it. New Horizons
reached Pluto right on time after a decade of flight that involved
taking a left turn at Jupiter... we can predict exactly what angle to
fire the rockets at in order to get where we want to go, even without
knowing how that gravity yank works.

Practicality beats purity?


Engineer!



Heard the one about the three engineers in the car that breaks down?

The chemical engineer suggests that they could have contaminated fuel.
They should try and get a sample and get someone to take it to a lab for
analysis.

The electrical engineer suggests that they check the battery and the
leads for any problems.

The Microsoft engineer suggests that they close all the windows, get out
of the car, get back in the car, open all the windows and see what
happens.


And an Apple engineer would suggest buying a new car that runs only on
its manufacturer's brand of fuel. :-)



Like it, marks out of 10, 15 :)

--
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask
what you can do for our language.

Mark Lawrence

--
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Re: OT Re: Math-embarrassment results in CS [was: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

2015-07-23 Thread Laura Creighton

In a message of Fri, 24 Jul 2015 00:29:28 +0300, Marko Rauhamaa writes:
Chris Angelico ros...@gmail.com:

 Fortunately, we don't need to completely understand it. New Horizons
 reached Pluto right on time after a decade of flight that involved
 taking a left turn at Jupiter... we can predict exactly what angle to
 fire the rockets at in order to get where we want to go, even without
 knowing how that gravity yank works.

 Practicality beats purity?

Engineer!

At the time I was in college I heard topology was very fashionable among
mathematicians. That was because it was one of the last remaining
research topics that didn't yet have an application.


Marko

I have a very good freind who is a knot-theorist.  (Chad Musick, who
may have proven something wonderful.) see: http://chadmusick.wikidot.com/knots
He says there are lots of applications for this in the field of circuit
board layouts.  And most mathematicians accept knot-theory as part of
topology.

Laura
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Re: OT Re: Math-embarrassment results in CS [was: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

Laura Creighton l...@openend.se:

 In a message of Fri, 24 Jul 2015 00:29:28 +0300, Marko Rauhamaa writes:
At the time I was in college I heard topology was very fashionable
among mathematicians. That was because it was one of the last
remaining research topics that didn't yet have an application.

 I have a very good freind who is a knot-theorist. (Chad Musick, who
 may have proven something wonderful.) see:
 http://chadmusick.wikidot.com/knots He says there are lots of
 applications for this in the field of circuit board layouts. And most
 mathematicians accept knot-theory as part of topology.

So topology, too, is lost.


Marko
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Re: OT Re: Math-embarrassment results in CS [was: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

2015-07-23 Thread Chris Angelico

On Fri, Jul 24, 2015 at 7:50 AM, Mark Lawrence breamore...@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
 Heard the one about the three engineers in the car that breaks down?

 The chemical engineer suggests that they could have contaminated fuel. They
 should try and get a sample and get someone to take it to a lab for
 analysis.

 The electrical engineer suggests that they check the battery and the leads
 for any problems.

 The Microsoft engineer suggests that they close all the windows, get out of
 the car, get back in the car, open all the windows and see what happens.


And the data scientist proved that the phenomenon is not wholly
unlikely, given the predicted average reliability of cars; further
studies would require improved sample size.

ChrisA
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Re: OT Re: Math-embarrassment results in CS [was: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

2015-07-23 Thread Rustom Mody

On Thursday, July 23, 2015 at 12:28:19 PM UTC+5:30, Gregory Ewing wrote:
 Rustom Mody wrote:
  Ive known good ones) most practicing-mathematicians proceed on the 
  assumption 
  that they *discover* math and not that they *invent* it.
 
 For something purely abstract like mathematics, I don't
 see how there's any distinction between discovering and
 inventing. They're two words for the same thing.
 
 I don't know what kind of -ist that makes me...

By some strange coincidence, a colleague just sent me this article on the 
mathematician John Horton Conway:
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jul/23/john-horton-conway-the-most-charismatic-mathematician-in-the-world

In which is this paragraph:
--
Conway is the rare sort of mathematician whose ability to connect his pet
mathematical interests makes one wonder if he isn't, at some level, shaping 
mathematical reality and not just exploring it, James Propp, a professor of 
mathematics at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, once told me. The 
example of this that I know best is a connection he discovered between sphere 
packing and games. These were two separate areas of study that Conway had 
arrived at by two different paths. So there's no reason for them to be linked. 
But somehow, through the force of his personality, and the intensity of his 
passion, he bent the mathematical universe to his will.
--
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Re: OT Re: Math-embarrassment results in CS [was: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

2015-07-23 Thread Rustom Mody

On Friday, July 24, 2015 at 2:59:41 AM UTC+5:30, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
 Chris :
 
  Fortunately, we don't need to completely understand it. New Horizons
  reached Pluto right on time after a decade of flight that involved
  taking a left turn at Jupiter... we can predict exactly what angle to
  fire the rockets at in order to get where we want to go, even without
  knowing how that gravity yank works.
 
  Practicality beats purity?
 
 Engineer!
 
 At the time I was in college I heard topology was very fashionable among
 mathematicians. That was because it was one of the last remaining
 research topics that didn't yet have an application.

Probably shows more than anything else how siloed university depts are:

http://www.amazon.in/Topology-Cambridge-Theoretical-Computer-Science/dp/0521576512
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Re: OT Re: Math-embarrassment results in CS [was: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

2015-07-23 Thread Rick Johnson

On Thursday, July 23, 2015 at 7:08:10 PM UTC-5, Grant Edwards wrote:
 You can always pick out the topologist at a conference:
 he's the one trying to dunk his coffee cup in his
 doughnut.
 
 [Hey, how often do you get to use a topology  joke.]

Don't sale yourself short Grant. You get extra bonus points
here: (1) told a rare joke and (2) perpetuated the off topic
ramblings in an effort to deflect from main subject. Nice
multitasking dude!




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Re: OT Re: Math-embarrassment results in CS [was: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

2015-07-23 Thread Paul Rubin

Grant Edwards invalid@invalid.invalid writes:
 You can always pick out the topologist at a conference: he's the one
 trying to dunk his coffee cup in his doughnut.
 [Hey, how often do you get to use a topology  joke.]

Did you hear about the idiot topologist?  He couldn't tell his butt from
a hole in the ground, but he *could* tell his butt from two holes in the
ground.
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Re: OT Re: Math-embarrassment results in CS [was: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

2015-07-23 Thread Rick Johnson

On Thursday, July 23, 2015 at 9:03:15 PM UTC-5, Paul Rubin wrote:
 Did you hear about the idiot topologist?  He couldn't tell his butt from
 a hole in the ground, but he *could* tell his butt from two holes in the
 ground.

This sounds more like a riddle than a joke. So in other
words: the message passing requires himself in one hole and
a clone of himself in another hole speaking the message
simultaneously?
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Re: OT Re: Math-embarrassment results in CS [was: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

2015-07-23 Thread Ian Kelly

On Jul 22, 2015 9:46 PM, Steven D'Aprano 
steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info wrote:

 On Thursday 23 July 2015 04:09, Rustom Mody wrote:

  tl;dr To me (as unprofessional a musician as mathematician) I find it
  arbitrary that Newton *discovered* gravity whereas Beethoven *composed*
  the 9th symphony.

 Newton didn't precisely *discover* gravity. I'm pretty sure that people
 before him didn't think that they were floating through the air
 weightless...

 *wink*


 Did gravity exist before Newton? Then he discovered it (in some sense).

 Did the 9th Symphony exist before Beethoven? No? Then he composed it.

Gravity existed before Newton, but the *theory* of gravity did not, so he
composed the theory?
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Re: OT Re: Math-embarrassment results in CS [was: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

2015-07-23 Thread Chris Angelico

On Fri, Jul 24, 2015 at 6:59 AM, Marko Rauhamaa ma...@pacujo.net wrote:
 Ian Kelly ian.g.ke...@gmail.com:

 Gravity existed before Newton, but the *theory* of gravity did not, so
 he composed the theory?

 Ironically, gravity is maybe the least well understood phenomenon in
 modern physics.

Fortunately, we don't need to completely understand it. New Horizons
reached Pluto right on time after a decade of flight that involved
taking a left turn at Jupiter... we can predict exactly what angle to
fire the rockets at in order to get where we want to go, even without
knowing how that gravity yank works.

Practicality beats purity?

ChrisA
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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

2015-07-23 Thread Rick Johnson

On Wednesday, July 22, 2015 at 11:26:50 PM UTC-5, Jason Swails wrote:
 I know my experiences don't hold true for everybody, but I
 also don't think they are uncommon (I know several
 colleagues that share many aspects of them).  And for me,
 the *better* Python 2.7 becomes, and the longer it's kept
 around, the easier (and more fun!) it makes my transition
 to Python 3.  So for me at least, arguments like don't
 make Python 2.7 too good or people won't switch are not
 only wrong, but in actuality counter-productive.

Thanks for sharing your story. You offer a compelling
argument for maintaining Py2.x in peak condition for many 
years. 

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Re: OT Re: Math-embarrassment results in CS [was: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

2015-07-23 Thread Gregory Ewing


Rustom Mody wrote:
Ive known good ones) most practicing-mathematicians proceed on the assumption 
that they *discover* math and not that they *invent* it.


For something purely abstract like mathematics, I don't
see how there's any distinction between discovering and
inventing. They're two words for the same thing.

I don't know what kind of -ist that makes me...

--
Greg
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Re: OT Re: Math-embarrassment results in CS [was: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

2015-07-23 Thread Rustom Mody

On Thursday, July 23, 2015 at 12:28:19 PM UTC+5:30, Gregory Ewing wrote:
 Rustom Mody wrote:
  Ive known good ones) most practicing-mathematicians proceed on the 
  assumption 
  that they *discover* math and not that they *invent* it.
 
 For something purely abstract like mathematics, I don't
 see how there's any distinction between discovering and
 inventing. They're two words for the same thing.
 
 I don't know what kind of -ist that makes me...

Ummm... Clever!
You give few clues... except for 'purely abstract'.
Does that mean entirely in your consciousness?
Or does it mean completely independent of the (physical) world and even time.
Latter is more or less definition of platonist
Former is some kind of combo of intuitionist and formalist (I guess!).

JFTR: I believe that post-Cantor 'platonism' is an abuse of Plato's original
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave
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Re: OT Re: Math-embarrassment results in CS [was: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

Steven D'Aprano st...@pearwood.info:

 I think that we can equally choose the natural numbers to be
 axiomatic, or sets to be axiomatic and derive natural numbers from
 them. Neither is more correct than the other.

Mathematicians quit trying to define what natural numbers mean and just
chose a standard enumerable sequence as *the* set of natural numbers.
That's analogous to physicists defining the meter as a particular rod in
a vault in Paris. So not even the length of the rod but the rod itself.

To modern mathematicians, the concept three simply means the fourth
element in the standard enumeration. When mathematicians need to use
natural numbers to count, they have to escape to predicate logic. For
example, to express that a natural number n has precisely two divisors,
you have to say,

   ∃x∈N ∃y∈N ¬x=y ∧ x|n ∧ y|n

(which avoids counting) or:

   ∃B∈P({x∈N : x|n}×2)
 (∀x∈{x∈N : x|n} ∃y∈2 ((x,y)∈B ∧ ∀z∈2 (x,z)∈B→y=z) ∧
  ∀x∈2 ∃y∈{x∈N : x|n} ((y,x)∈B ∧ ∀z∈{x∈N : x|n} (z,x)∈B→y=z))

This latter clumsy expression captures the notion of counting. However,
in programming terms, you could say counting is not first-class in
mathematics. Counting is done as a macro if you will.

If the logicians had managed to define natural numbers the way they
wanted, counting would be first class and simple:

   {x∈N : x|n}∈2


Marko
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Re: OT Re: Math-embarrassment results in CS [was: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

2015-07-22 Thread Laura Creighton

One way to look at this is to see that arithmetic is _behaviour_.
Like all behaviours, it is subject to reification:
see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification

and especially as it is done in the German language, reification has
this nasty habit of turning behaviours (i.e. things that are most like
a verb) into nouns, or things that require nouns.  Even the word
_behaviour_ is suspect, as it is a noun. 

This noun-making can be contagious  if we thought of the world, not
as a thing, but happening-now (and see how hard it is to not have
a noun like 'process' there) would we come to the question of 'Who
made it?'  For there would be no 'it' there to point at.

It is not too surprising that the mathematicians have run into the
limits of reification.  There is only so much 'pretend this is a
thing' you can do under relentless questioning before the 'thing-ness'
just goes away ...

Laura
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Re: OT Re: Math-embarrassment results in CS [was: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

On Thu, 23 Jul 2015 02:58 am, Steven D'Aprano wrote:

 1. We have reason to expect that the natural numbers are absolutely
 fundamental and irreducible
 
 That's wrong. If we had such a reason, we could state it: the reason we
 expect natural numbers are irreducible is ... and fill in the blank. But
 I don't believe that such a reason exists (or at least, as far as we
 know).

Sorry, that's not as clear as I intended. By a reason, I mean a direct
reason for that choice, rather than some reason for the opposite choice. I
hope that's clear? Perhaps an example will help.

Are tomatoes red?

We can have direct reasons for believing that tomatoes are red, e.g. the
light reflecting off these tomatoes peaks at frequency X, which is within
the range of red light. 

Alternatively, we might not have any such reason, and be reduced to arguing
against the alternatives. Only if all the alternatives are false could we
then believe that tomatoes are red.

If tomatoes were blue, they would appear green when viewed under yellow
light; since these tomatoes fail to appear green, they might be red.

I'm suggesting that we have no direct reason for believing that the natural
numbers are irreducible concepts, only indirect ones, namely that all the
attempts to reduce them are unsatisfactory in some fashion or another. But
neither do we have direct reasons for expecting them to be reducible.


-- 
Steven

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Re: OT Re: Math-embarrassment results in CS [was: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

On Wednesday, July 22, 2015 at 11:22:57 PM UTC+5:30, Oscar Benjamin wrote:
 On Wed, 22 Jul 2015 at 18:01 Steven D'Aprano st...@pearwood.info wrote:
 
 
 
 I think that the critical factor there is that it is all in the past tense.
 
 Today, I believe, the vast majority of mathematicians fall into two camps:
 
 
 
 (1) Those who just use numbers without worrying about defining them in some
 
 deep or fundamental sense;
 
 
 
 Probably. I'd say that worrying too much about the true essence of numbers is 
 just Platonism. Numbers are a construct (a very useful one). There are many 
 other constructs used within mathematics and there are numerous ways to 
 connect them or define them in terms of each other. Usually these are 
 referred to as connections or sometimes more formally as isomorphisms and 
 they can be useful but don't need to have any metaphysical meaning.

Philosophers-of-mathematics decry platonism.
However from my experience (I am not a professional mathematician, though
Ive known good ones) most practicing-mathematicians proceed on the assumption 
that they *discover* math and not that they *invent* it.
To me this says that though they may not know the meaning or spelling of 
platonism, they all layman-adhere to it.

tl;dr To me (as unprofessional a musician as mathematician) I find it arbitrary
that Newton *discovered* gravity whereas Beethoven *composed* the 9th symphony.
Maybe Beethoven was sent my God to write Ode-to-Joy and reunite Europe?
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Re: OT Re: Math-embarrassment results in CS [was: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

Nice Thanks for that Laura!
I am reminded of

| The toughest job Indians ever had was explaining to the whiteman who their 
| noun-god is. Repeat. That's because God isn't a noun in Native America.
| God is a verb!
From http://hilgart.org/enformy/dma-god.htm

On Wednesday, July 22, 2015 at 10:48:38 PM UTC+5:30, Laura Creighton wrote:
 One way to look at this is to see that arithmetic is _behaviour_.
 Like all behaviours, it is subject to reification:
 see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification

This is just a pointer to various disciplines/definitions...
Which did you intend?
By and large (for me, a CSist) I regard reification as philosophicalese for
what programmers call first-classness.
As someone brought up on Lisp and FP, was trained to regard 
reification/firstclassness
as wonderful.  However after seeing the overwhelming stupidity of 
OOP-treated-as-a-philosophy,
Ive become suspect of this.
If http://steve-yegge.blogspot.in/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of-nouns.html
was just a joke it would be a laugh. I believe it is an accurate description
of the brain-pickling it does to its religious adherents.
And so now I am suspect of firstclassness in FP as well:
http://blog.languager.org/2012/08/functional-programming-philosophical.html
(last point)

 
 and especially as it is done in the German language, reification has
 this nasty habit of turning behaviours (i.e. things that are most like
 a verb) into nouns, or things that require nouns.  Even the word
 _behaviour_ is suspect, as it is a noun. 
 
 This noun-making can be contagious  if we thought of the world, not
 as a thing, but happening-now (and see how hard it is to not have
 a noun like 'process' there) would we come to the question of 'Who
 made it?'  For there would be no 'it' there to point at.
 
 It is not too surprising that the mathematicians have run into the
 limits of reification.  There is only so much 'pretend this is a
 thing' you can do under relentless questioning before the 'thing-ness'
 just goes away ...

Yes but one person's threshold where thing-ness can be far away from another's.
Newton used thingness of ∞ (infinitesimals) with impunity and invented calculus.
Gauss found this very improper and re-invented calculus without 'completed 
infinity'.
Yet mathematicians habitually find that, for example generating functions that
are obviously divergent (∴ semantically meaningless) are perfectly serviceable
to solve recurrences; solutions which can subsequently be verified without the
generating functions.
Which side should be embarrassed?
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Re: OT Re: Math-embarrassment results in CS [was: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

2015-07-22 Thread Laura Creighton

In a message of Wed, 22 Jul 2015 10:49:13 -0700, Rustom Mody writes:
Nice Thanks for that Laura!
I am reminded of

| The toughest job Indians ever had was explaining to the whiteman who their 
| noun-god is. Repeat. That's because God isn't a noun in Native America.
| God is a verb!
From http://hilgart.org/enformy/dma-god.htm

On Wednesday, July 22, 2015 at 10:48:38 PM UTC+5:30, Laura Creighton wrote:
 One way to look at this is to see that arithmetic is _behaviour_.
 Like all behaviours, it is subject to reification:
 see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification

This is just a pointer to various disciplines/definitions...
Which did you intend?

I meant -- depending on your background -- go find a meaning for
reification that makes sense to you.  And then extend this to some
other areas.

By and large (for me, a CSist) I regard reification as philosophicalese for
what programmers call first-classness.

Me too.  But there are more people out there who know something about
reification than there are that know about first classness.

As someone brought up on Lisp and FP, was trained to regard 
reification/firstclassness
as wonderful.  However after seeing the overwhelming stupidity of 
OOP-treated-as-a-philosophy,
Ive become suspect of this.

If http://steve-yegge.blogspot.in/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of-nouns.html
was just a joke it would be a laugh. I believe it is an accurate description
of the brain-pickling it does to its religious adherents.
And so now I am suspect of firstclassness in FP as well:
http://blog.languager.org/2012/08/functional-programming-philosophical.html
(last point)

 
 and especially as it is done in the German language, reification has
 this nasty habit of turning behaviours (i.e. things that are most like
 a verb) into nouns, or things that require nouns.  Even the word
 _behaviour_ is suspect, as it is a noun. 
 
 This noun-making can be contagious  if we thought of the world, not
 as a thing, but happening-now (and see how hard it is to not have
 a noun like 'process' there) would we come to the question of 'Who
 made it?'  For there would be no 'it' there to point at.
 
 It is not too surprising that the mathematicians have run into the
 limits of reification.  There is only so much 'pretend this is a
 thing' you can do under relentless questioning before the 'thing-ness'
 just goes away ...

Yes but one person's threshold where thing-ness can be far away from another's.
Newton used thingness of ∞ (infinitesimals) with impunity and invented 
calculus.
Gauss found this very improper and re-invented calculus without 'completed 
infinity'.
Yet mathematicians habitually find that, for example generating functions that
are obviously divergent (∴ semantically meaningless) are perfectly serviceable
to solve recurrences; solutions which can subsequently be verified without the
generating functions.
Which side should be embarrassed?

Embarassment is a function of the ego.  The ego is _another_ one of those nouns
where if you try to stalk it, it falls apart because it was produced by
behaviour, rather than the cause of behaviour.

Descartes:  I think, therefore I am.  (Because there must be an I that is
doing the thinking.)

Modern Day Western Neurologist:  Thinking is going on.  Therefore an I is
produced.

Laura

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OT Re: Math-embarrassment results in CS [was: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

On Wed, 22 Jul 2015 11:34 pm, Rustom Mody wrote:

On Tuesday, July 21, 2015 at 4:09:56 PM UTC+5:30, Steven D'Aprano wrote:

We have no reason to expect that the natural numbers are anything less
than absolutely fundamental and irreducible (as the Wikipedia article
above puts it). It's remarkable that we can reduce all of mathematics to
essentially a single axiom: the concept of the set.

These two statements above contradict each other.
With the double-negatives and other lint removed they read:

I meant what I said.

1. We have reason to expect that the natural numbers are absolutely
fundamental and irreducible

That's wrong. If we had such a reason, we could state it: the reason we
expect natural numbers are irreducible is ... and fill in the blank. But I
don't believe that such a reason exists (or at least, as far as we know).

However, neither do we have any reason to think that they are *not*
irreducible. Hence, we have no reason to think that they are anything but
irreducible.

2. We can reduce all of mathematics to essentially a single axiom: the
concept of the set.

Heh, yes, that is a bit funny. But I don't think it's really a
contradiction, because I don't think that numbers really are sets.

The set-theoretic definition of the natural numbers is quite nice, but is it
really simpler than the old fashioned idea of natural numbers as counting
numbers? Certainly it shows that we have a one-to-one correspondence from
the natural numbers to sets, building from the empty set alone, and in some
sense sets seem more primitive. But I think that proving that sets actually
are more primitive is another story.

I think that we can equally choose the natural numbers to be axiomatic, or
sets to be axiomatic and derive natural numbers from them. Neither is more
correct than the other.

By the way, my comment about essentially a single axiom should be read
informally. Formally, you need a whole bunch of axioms:

http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/68659/set-theoretic-construction-of-the-natural-numbers

I stated that the set-theoretic definition was generally accepted, but
that's quite far from saying it is logically proven. The definition comes
from Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory (ZF) plus the Axiom of Choice (ZFC), but
the Axiom of Choice is not uncontroversial. E.g. the Banach-Tarski paradox
follows from AC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach%E2%80%93Tarski_paradox

Like any other Axiom, the Axiom of Choice is unprovable. You can either
accept it or reject it, and there is also ZF¬C. Jerry Bona jokes:

The Axiom of Choice is obviously true, the well-ordering principle
obviously false, and who can tell about Zorn's lemma?

the joke being that all three are mathematically equivalent.

So are you on the number-side -- Poincare, Brouwer, Heyting...
Or the set-side -- Cantor, Russel, Hilbert... ??

Yes. I think both points of view are useful, even if only useful in
understanding what the limits of that view are.

On Tuesday 21 July 2015 19:10, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
Our ancestors defined the fingers (or digits) as the set of numbers.
Modern mathematicians have managed to enhance the definition
quantitatively but not qualitatively.

So what?

This is not a problem for the use of numbers in science, engineering or
mathematics (including computer science, which may be considered a branch
of all three). There may be still a few holdouts who hope that Gödel is
wrong and Russell's dream of being able to define all of mathematics in
terms of logic can be resurrected, but everyone else has moved on, and
don't consider it to be an embarrassment any more than it is an
embarrassment that all of philosophy collapses in a heap when faced with
solipsism.

That's a bizarre view.

Really? Which part(s) do you consider bizarre?

(1) That the lack of any fundamental definition of numbers in terms is not a
problem in practice?

(2) That comp sci can be considered a branch of science, engineering and
mathematics?

(3) That there may still be a few people who hope Gödel is wrong?

(4) That everyone else (well, at least everyone else in mathematics, for
some definition of everyone) has moved on?

(5) That philosophy is unable to cope with the problem of solipsism?

I don't think any of those statements are *bizarre*, i.e. conspicuously or
grossly unconventional or unusual; eccentric; freakish; gonzo; outlandish;
outre; grotesque.

In hindsight, my claim of everyone else having moved on is too strong --
there are millions of mathematicians in the world, and I'm sure that you
can find one or two who don't fall into either of the two categories I
gave. That is, they neither wish to dispute Gödel nor do they accept the
irreducibility of numbers as something matter-of-fact and not embarrassing.
So let's just quietly insert an almost before everyone and move on,
shall we?

As a subjective view I dont feel embarrassed by... its not arguable
other than to say embarrassment is like

Re: OT Re: Math-embarrassment results in CS [was: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

2015-07-22 Thread Paul Rubin

Steven D'Aprano st...@pearwood.info writes:
 That's wrong. If we had such a reason, we could state it: the reason
 we expect natural numbers are irreducible is ... and fill in the
 blank. But I don't believe that such a reason exists (or at least, as
 far as we know).

 However, neither do we have any reason to think that they are *not*
 irreducible. Hence, we have no reason to think that they are anything
 but irreducible.

But by the same reasoning, we have no reason to think they are anything
but non-irreducible (reducible, I guess).  What the heck does it mean
for a natural number to be irreducible anyway?  I know what it means for
a polynomial to be irreducable, but the natural number analogy would be
a composite number, and there are plenty of those.

You might like this:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110806055104/http://www.math.princeton.edu/~nelson/papers/hm.pdf

Remember also that in ultrafinitism, Peano Arithmetic goes from 1 to
88 (due to Shachaf on irc #haskell).  ;-)
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Re: OT Re: Math-embarrassment results in CS [was: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

2015-07-22 Thread Oscar Benjamin

On Wed, 22 Jul 2015 at 18:01 Steven D'Aprano st...@pearwood.info wrote:


 I think that the critical factor there is that it is all in the past tense.
 Today, I believe, the vast majority of mathematicians fall into two camps:

 (1) Those who just use numbers without worrying about defining them in some
 deep or fundamental sense;


Probably. I'd say that worrying too much about the true essence of numbers
is just Platonism. Numbers are a construct (a very useful one). There are
many other constructs used within mathematics and there are numerous ways
to connect them or define them in terms of each other. Usually these are
referred to as connections or sometimes more formally as isomorphisms
and they can be useful but don't need to have any metaphysical meaning.

Conventional mathematics treats the natural numbers as subsets of the
complex numbers and usually treats the complex numbers as the most basic
type of numbers. Exactly how you construct this out of sets is not as
important as the usefulness of this concept when actually trying to use
numbers.

(2) Those who understand Gödel and have given up or rejected Russell's
 program to define mathematics in terms of pure logic.

snip

 It's that I think that Russell's program is a degenerate research program
 and irrelevant paradigm abandoned by nearly everyone. Not only does Gödel
 prove the impossibility of Russell's attempt to ground mathematics in pure
 logic, but mathematicians have by and large rejected Russell's paradigm as
 irrelevant, like quintessence or aether to physicists, or how many angels
 can dance on the head of a pin to theologians. In simple terms, hardly
 anyone cares how you define numbers, so long as the definition gives you
 arithmetic.


Actually in the decades since the incompleteness theorems were published
much of mathematics has simply ignored the problem. Hilbert's idea to
construct everything out of formal systems of axioms and proof rules
continues to be pushed to its limits. This is now a standard approach in
the literature, in textbooks and published papers, and in undergraduate
programs. In contrast Gödel's (Platonist IMO) intuitionist idea of
mathematical proof is ignored.

The thing is that it turns out that even if you can't prove everything then
you can at least prove a lot: Gödel demonstrated the existence of at least
one unprovable theorem. Since we know that there are loads of unproven
theorems and that loads of them continue to be proven all the time we
clearly haven't yet hit any kind of Gödel limit that would impede further
progress.


 Quoting Wikipedia:

 In the years following Gödel's theorems, as it became clear that there is
 no hope of proving consistency of mathematics, and with development of
 axiomatic set theories such as Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory and the lack of
 any evidence against its consistency, most mathematicians lost interest in
 the topic.


They lost interest in the topic of proving consistency, completeness etc.
They didn't lose interest in creating an explosion of different sets of
axioms and proof systems, studying the limits of each and trying to push as
much of conventional mathematics as possible into grand frameworks.

For a modern example of Hilbert's legacy take a look at these guys:

http://us.metamath.org/mpegif/mmtheorems.html

They've tried to construct all of mathematics out of set theory using a
fully formal (computer verifiable) proof database. They define the natural
numbers as a subset of the complex numbers:

http://us.metamath.org/mpegif/mmtheorems87.html#mm8625s

The complex numbers themselves are defined in terms of the ordinal numbers
which are similar to the natural numbers but have a distinct definition in
terms of sets:

http://us.metamath.org/mpegif/mmtheorems77.html#mm7635s

I think they did it that way because it's just too awkward if the complex
number 1 isn't the same as the natural number 1.

--
Oscar
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Re: OT Re: Math-embarrassment results in CS [was: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

On Wednesday, July 22, 2015 at 11:18:23 PM UTC+5:30, Paul Rubin wrote:
 Remember also that in ultrafinitism, Peano Arithmetic goes from 1 to
 88 (due to Shachaf on irc #haskell).  ;-)

No No No
Its 42; Dont you know?
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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

2015-07-22 Thread Terry Reedy


On 7/21/2015 10:07 PM, Rick Johnson wrote:


two possibilities exist:

   (a) Mark is a core dev who has committed patches and is a
   bully.

   (b) Mark is not a core dev, and therefor can not commit
   anything, therefor he's a bully *AND* a hypocrite!

Which is it?


Mark is not a core dev, cannot commit, and as far as I know, has never 
claimed such.  However, he has participated on the tracker, has reviewed 
patches, and has submitted patches, at least one of which has been 
committed.  His user name is BreamoreBoy and his tracker email is the 
same breamore@ address that recently upset you.  'BreamoreBoy' has been 
nosy on at least 1483 issues, over half as many as me.


You, as 'RantingRick' have opened 1 issue, quickly closed, but not 
posted under than name on any others.

https://bugs.python.org/issue8970
You sent one patch to me which I applied.
Maybe there is some other activity that I missed.

I would prefer it if you both stopped snipping and sniping at each other.

--
Terry Jan Reedy

--
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Re: Math-embarrassment results in CS [was: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

On Tuesday, July 21, 2015 at 4:09:56 PM UTC+5:30, Steven D'Aprano wrote:

 We have no reason to expect that the natural numbers are anything less than 
 absolutely fundamental and irreducible (as the Wikipedia article above 
 puts it). It's remarkable that we can reduce all of mathematics to 
 essentially a single axiom: the concept of the set.

These two statements above contradict each other.
With the double-negatives and other lint removed they read:

1. We have reason to expect that the natural numbers are absolutely fundamental 
and irreducible

2. We can reduce all of mathematics to essentially a single axiom: the concept 
of the set.

So are you on the number-side -- Poincare, Brouwer, Heyting...
Or the set-side -- Cantor, Russel, Hilbert... ??

 On Tuesday 21 July 2015 19:10, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
  Our ancestors defined the fingers (or digits) as the set of numbers.
  Modern mathematicians have managed to enhance the definition
  quantitatively but not qualitatively.
 
 So what?
 
 This is not a problem for the use of numbers in science, engineering or 
 mathematics (including computer science, which may be considered a branch of 
 all three). There may be still a few holdouts who hope that Gödel is wrong 
 and Russell's dream of being able to define all of mathematics in terms of 
 logic can be resurrected, but everyone else has moved on, and don't consider 
 it to be an embarrassment any more than it is an embarrassment that all of 
 philosophy collapses in a heap when faced with solipsism.

That's a bizarre view.
As a subjective view I dont feel embarrassed by... its not arguable other than
to say embarrassment is like thick-skinnedness -- some have elephant-skins 
some have gossamer skins

As an objective view its just wrong: Eminent mathematicians have disagreed
so strongly with each other as to what putative math is kosher and what 
embarrassing that they've sent each other to mental institutions.

And -- most important of all -- these arguments are at the root of why CS 
'happened' : http://blog.languager.org/2015/03/cs-history-0.html

The one reason why this view -- the embarrassments in math/logic foundations 
are no longer relevant as they were in the 1930s -- is because people think
CS is mostly engineering, hardly math. So (the argument runs) just as general 
relativity is irrelevant to bridge-building, so also meta-mathematics is to 
pragmatic CS.

The answer to this view -- unfortunately widely-held -- is the same as above:
http://blog.languager.org/2015/03/cs-history-0.html
A knowledge of the history will disabuse of the holder of these 
misunderstandings
and misconceptions
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Re: OT Re: Math-embarrassment results in CS [was: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

2015-07-22 Thread Chris Angelico

On Thu, Jul 23, 2015 at 11:44 AM, Dennis Lee Bieber
wlfr...@ix.netcom.com wrote:
 On Thu, 23 Jul 2015 03:21:24 +1000, Steven D'Aprano st...@pearwood.info
 declaimed the following:


Are tomatoes red?

 In answer I offer a novel: /Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop
 Cafe/ (and lots of recipes for such on Google)

I think we can take it as red.

*dives for cover*

ChrisA
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Re: OT Re: Math-embarrassment results in CS [was: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

On Thursday 23 July 2015 03:48, Paul Rubin wrote:

 Steven D'Aprano st...@pearwood.info writes:
 That's wrong. If we had such a reason, we could state it: the reason
 we expect natural numbers are irreducible is ... and fill in the
 blank. But I don't believe that such a reason exists (or at least, as
 far as we know).

 However, neither do we have any reason to think that they are *not*
 irreducible. Hence, we have no reason to think that they are anything
 but irreducible.
 
 But by the same reasoning, we have no reason to think they are anything
 but non-irreducible (reducible, I guess).  What the heck does it mean
 for a natural number to be irreducible anyway?  

Reducible in the sense that we can define the natural numbers in terms of a 
simpler concept. E.g. the rationals can be reduced to the quotient of 
integers. One might argue that defining them in terms of sets is precisely 
that, but then we get into an argument as to which is simpler, natural 
numbers or sets?



-- 
Steve

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Re: OT Re: Math-embarrassment results in CS [was: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

On Thursday 23 July 2015 04:09, Rustom Mody wrote:

 tl;dr To me (as unprofessional a musician as mathematician) I find it
 arbitrary that Newton *discovered* gravity whereas Beethoven *composed*
 the 9th symphony.

Newton didn't precisely *discover* gravity. I'm pretty sure that people 
before him didn't think that they were floating through the air 
weightless... 

*wink*


Did gravity exist before Newton? Then he discovered it (in some sense).

Did the 9th Symphony exist before Beethoven? No? Then he composed it.


-- 
Steve

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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

2015-07-22 Thread Jason Swails

I am a little late to the party, but I feel that I have something to
contribute to this discussion.  Apologies for the top-post, but it's really
in response to any particular question; more of a this is my story with
Python 2.7.  I still use primarily Python 2.7, although I write code using
six to support both Py2 and 3 in the same code base and I'm slowly making
the transition.

I have written Python code for primarily Linux machines only since 2008,
and until the last year or two, exclusively for Python 2.  In my brief,
early forays into Python 3, I experienced mostly discomfort.  Discovering
2to3 alleviated some of that. But my general lack of need for anything
beyond ASCII meant that when my abstracted file reading/writing routines
started returning/requiring a mishmash of bytes and str depending on what
kind of file was opened sent me into a TypeError/AttributeError rabbithole
and made me give up.

But Python 2 continued to get developed (eventually culminating in Python
2.7 and its continual improvements), and many good features of Python 3
found its way into Python 2.7 for awhile.  As I got better with Python 2.7,
and finally abandoned Python 2.7, I revisited Python 3 support through the
six module and found that it was really not too bad maintaining a single
code base for both Python 2.7 and Python 3+.  While I was working on that,
though, I still had Python 2.7 to rely on as a safety net.  Basically,
Python 2.7 was my gateway into Python 3.  Where it was more similar to
Python 3, the transition was easier (modules like urllib and website
processing as well as Tkinter coding are some of my more difficult tasks,
since I have to constantly look up where stuff has moved and figure out how
compatible they are between versions). I have also since discovered
TextIOWrapper and come to understand the nature of the bytes/str split and
when to expect which, so that's no longer a problem (even though I still
never need Unicode).

And the more I use six, the more I find that I'm discarding Python 2
baggage (like range and zip in exchange for xrange and izip) and using the
Python 3 replacements through six or __future__ (absolute imports, print
function, division, ...).  And gems like OrderedDict being made available
to Python 2.7 did a lot to convince me to shed my allegiance to Python
=2.6, getting me even closer to Python 3.

Where I used to see the Py3 overhaul of I/O as an incomprehensible mess
(because it broke all my code!), It now appears as an elegant solution and
I find myself having to patch (fortunately only a few) deficiencies in
Python 2 that simply don't exist in Python 3's superior design.  For
example:

# Works in Python 3, not in Python 2
from six.moves.urllib.request import urlopen
import bz2
import gzip
from io import TextIOWrapper

TextIOWrapper(bz2.BZ2File(urlopen('
http://www.somewebsite.com/path/to/file.bz2')))
TextIOWrapper(gzip.GzipFile(fileobj=urlopen('
http://www.somewebsite.com/path/to/file.gz')))

So for Python 2, my file handling routine has to download the entire
contents to a BytesIO and feed *that* to bz2.decompress or gzip.GzipFile,
which can be a bottleneck if I only want to inspect the headers of many
large files (which I sometimes do).  But the workaround exists and my code
can be written to support both Python 2 and Python 3 without much hassle.
If I run that code under Python 3, I get a huge performance boost in some
corner cases thanks to the improved underlying design.

Python 3 is the future, and thanks to how *good* Python 2.7 is, I am ready
to make that leap and shed some extra code baggage when the popular
versions of the popular Linux distros make the move to a default system
Python 3 (and they will... someday).

I know my experiences don't hold true for everybody, but I also don't think
they are uncommon (I know several colleagues that share many aspects of
them).  And for me, the *better* Python 2.7 becomes, and the longer it's
kept around, the easier (and more fun!) it makes my transition to Python
3.  So for me at least, arguments like don't make Python 2.7 too good or
people won't switch are not only wrong, but in actuality
counter-productive.

Apologies for the novel,
Jason

On Sat, Jul 18, 2015 at 7:36 PM, Terry Reedy tjre...@udel.edu wrote:

 I asked the following as an off-topic aside in a reply on another thread.
 I got one response which presented a point I had not considered.  I would
 like more viewpoints from 2.7 users.

 Background: each x.y.0 release normally gets up to 2 years of bugfixes,
 until x.(y+1).0 is released.  For 2.7, released summer 2010, the bugfix
 period was initially extended to 5 years, ending about now.  At the spring
 pycon last year, the period was extended to 10 years, with an emphasis on
 security and build fixed.  My general question is what other fixes should
 be made?  Some specific forms of this question are the following.

 If the vast majority of Python programmers are focused on 2.7, why are
 volunteers to help fix 2.7

Re: OT Re: Math-embarrassment results in CS [was: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

2015-07-22 Thread Mark Lawrence


On 22/07/2015 19:14, Laura Creighton wrote:

I don't suppose anybody could spare a bit of time for something that is 
slightly more important IMHO, like getting the core workflow going?


I'm fairly well convinced that the vast majority of people here aren't 
in the slightest bit interested in actually doing anything, but just in 
case you could try reading.


https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0462/
https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0474/

--
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask
what you can do for our language.

Mark Lawrence

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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

2015-07-22 Thread Rick Johnson

On Wednesday, July 22, 2015 at 1:51:57 AM UTC-5, Terry Reedy wrote:
  Which is it?
 
 Mark is not a core dev [...] However His user name is
 BreamoreBoy and his tracker email is the same breamore@
 address that recently upset you.

Thank you for confirming my suspicion. You have always been
honest, and that is why i carry a great respect for you. It
seems that D'Aprano's attempt at gas lighting me will not
only fail, but also expose him as one of the cohorts. It's
no surprise though, Steven  Chris  Mark have been bullying
me for years.

 I would prefer it if you both stopped snipping and sniping
 at each other.

I agree. But you don't need to convince me. Tell Mark, Chris
and Steven. The few times i did try to contribute i was
toyed with. (except for the one time i provided you with a
patch, of course). Why would i subject myself to those
childish games again? Until people start treating me like a
respected member, i'm going to be a thorn in the gluteus
maximus of this group. I can be either a friend or a foe --
their choice!

PS: One thing i have noticed, in my many years here, is
that: When the truth starts to support my argument, the
thread mysteriously forks on some OT subject, and usually
a subject that involves heavy emotional or philosophical
debate. Such as is the case now. I think the mainstream
media could learn a thing or two about diversionary tactics
simply from watching this group.

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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

2015-07-21 Thread Rick Johnson

On Tuesday, July 21, 2015 at 4:22:50 PM UTC-5, bream...@gmail.com wrote:

 It was actually Rustom who posted inaccurate data as only
 core-devs have commit rights.

Well-well. We now find ourselves before the royal court of
logic: If we are to take your statement as fact, then only
two possibilities exist:

  (a) Mark is a core dev who has committed patches and is a
  bully.
  
  (b) Mark is not a core dev, and therefor can not commit
  anything, therefor he's a bully *AND* a hypocrite!

Which is it?

 It would appear that your knowledge of the current
 development process is as good as your knowledge of
 European geography.

So you've been lurking in that thread also? As with this
thread, folks have mis-interpreted my words. When i get a
chance to respond over there, you shall become enlightened
and humbled.
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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

2015-07-21 Thread breamoreboy

On Tuesday, July 21, 2015 at 4:04:30 AM UTC+1, Rick Johnson wrote:
 On Sunday, July 19, 2015 at 9:17:11 PM UTC-5, Rustom Mody wrote:
 
 
  List of python committers:
  -
   11081 Guido van Rossum
  [snip: long list]
 
 Thanks for posting this list of names. I had put in a pyFOIA
 request for this data a few years ago, but to my surprise, was
 flat out denied. I'm not sure how exhaustive this list may be,
 but publicly displaying the commit hierarchy within the Python
 community is very import for those who may want to get involved.
 
 [Talking to Mark Lawrence, Rustom said:]
  So... May I humbly ask where are your precious commits??
 
 Thanks for putting Mark in his place. He has been brow
 beating folks on this list (myself included) for years, and
 i'll bet he now feels as tiny as D'Aprano did -- when GvR
 scolded him for disrespecting a Noob on Python-ideas.
 

Read on, oh great stupid one.

   Yeah, i was watching! 
 
   I'M *ALWAYS* WATCHING!
 
   ಠ_ಠ
 
 Now that Mark's lack of commit cred has been exposed, we can
 safely ignore his hollow and hypocritical bullying. And now
 that he has been de-fanged, he will be forced to seek employment
 elsewhere. Hmm, my suggestion is that he market himself as an
 on-call peanut butter removal service. A venture that will
 no doubt be successful, seeing that he has two heads up on
 his competition!

Ever heard the saying engage brain before putting mouth into gear?  It was 
actually Rustom who posted inaccurate data as only core-devs have commit 
rights.  It would appear that your knowledge of the current development process 
is as good as your knowledge of European geography.  I would say enjoy your 
future in the peanut butter removal service but it is quite clear that you 
haven't the skills needed to make it happen.  In the mean time I'll quite 
happily carry on contributing to the Python community as best I can.

Oh, and while I think about it, you'd better put that shovel down, or the hole 
will only get deeper.

Have a nice day :)
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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

2015-07-21 Thread Mark Lawrence


On 20/07/2015 03:36, Steven D'Aprano wrote:

On Mon, 20 Jul 2015 06:21 am, breamore...@gmail.com wrote:


All in all though I have to admit that overall it's a really onerous task.
  Once you've produced the patch you have to go to all the trouble of
logging on to the issue tracker, finding the appropriate issue and
uploading the patch.  You may even be inclined to make a comment.  In this
case this entire process could take as much as two whole minutes.


It's very interesting that you ignore the two hardest parts of the process:

(1) Producing the patch in the first place.

(2) Convincing those with appropriate commit rights to accept the patch.




I didn't actually intend to ignore anything, only the whole context has 
been altered as you've snipped the previous paragraph that led into the 
above.


I don't know about the hardest part of the process, but I believe that 
the actual commit part is a PITA regardless of the size of the patch 
involved.  The good news on that front is that the core workflow project 
has kick started again.  The bad news is I haven't got the faintest idea 
what the timescale is, a year, two, I've simply no idea?


One thing I do know is that it has to be made to work, as I doubt that 
there's a single member of the community who can be happy with the 
current workflow.  Still in a way that is a good sign as it shows that 
currently Python is a victim of its own success.


Once the core workflow project has succeeded, and I'll repeat that it 
has to, then Python will definitely achieve what Pinky and the Brain 
failed to do :)


--
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask
what you can do for our language.

Mark Lawrence

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Re: Devanagari int literals [was Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

2015-07-21 Thread Marko Rauhamaa

Chris Angelico ros...@gmail.com:

 On Tue, Jul 21, 2015 at 7:10 PM, Marko Rauhamaa ma...@pacujo.net wrote:
 This is getting deep. It is an embarrassing metamathematical fact
 that numbers cannot be defined. At least, mathematicians gave up
 trying a century ago.

In mathematics, the essence of counting a set and finding a result
n, is that it establishes a one to one correspondence (or
bijection) of the set with the set of numbers {1, 2, ..., n}.
URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counting#Counting_in_mathematics

 AIUI, zero is defined as the cardinality of the empty set, one is
 defined as the cardinality of the set containing the empty set, two is
 defined as the cardinality of the set containing the empty set and the
 set containing the set containing the empty set... which makes
 mathematics the only language *more verbose* than the Shakespeare
 Programming Language in its definition of fundamental constants.

   There are two approaches to cardinality – one which compares sets
   directly using bijections and injections, and another which uses
   cardinal numbers.
   URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinality

The first approach is comparative, the second approach is quantitative.
You must be referring to the latter meaning (cardinality ~ cardinal
number). However:

   In mathematics, cardinal numbers, or cardinals for short, are a
   generalization of the natural numbers [...]
   URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_number

IOW, cardinal numbers assume natural numbers as a given. Thus, your
definition of natural numbers leads to a circular definition.

Frege et al tried to do the natural thing and defined natural numbers as
equivalence classes:

   0 = the set of sets with no elements
   1 = the set of sets with a single element
   2 = the set of sets with precisely two elements
   etc

Unfortunately, the natural thing leads to a contradiction and must be
abandoned.

Nowadays, mathematicians are content with working with one prototypical
chain of beads:

   0 = ∅
   1 = { 0 }
   2 = { 0, 1 }
   3 = { 0, 1, 2 }
   etc

IOW:

   0 = ∅
   σ(n) = n ∪ { n }

and forget about the true essence of numbers.


Marko
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Re: Devanagari int literals [was Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

2015-07-21 Thread Mark Lawrence


On 21/07/2015 10:10, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:

Laura Creighton l...@openend.se:


In a message of Mon, 20 Jul 2015 20:30:48 -0700, Rustom Mody writes:


Can some unicode/Chinese literate person inform me whether that
ideograph is equivalent to roman '9' or roman 'nine'?


Ah, I don't understand you. What do you mean roman 'nine'? a phonetic
way of saying things? What bankers use to help prevent forgeries?
Something else?


This is getting deep. It is an embarrassing metamathematical fact that
numbers cannot be defined. At least, mathematicians gave up trying a
century ago.

In mathematics, the essence of counting a set and finding a result n,
is that it establishes a one to one correspondence (or bijection) of
the set with the set of numbers {1, 2, ..., n}.
URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counting#Counting_in_mathematics

Our ancestors defined the fingers (or digits) as the set of numbers.
Modern mathematicians have managed to enhance the definition
quantitatively but not qualitatively.



Not all of them 
http://www.languagesandnumbers.com/how-to-count-in-paici/en/pri/


--
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what you can do for our language.

Mark Lawrence

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Re: Devanagari int literals [was Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

2015-07-21 Thread Steven D'Aprano

On Tuesday 21 July 2015 19:10, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:


 This is getting deep.

When things get too deep, stop digging.


 It is an embarrassing metamathematical fact that
 numbers cannot be defined. At least, mathematicians gave up trying a
 century ago.

That's not the case. It's not so much that they stopped trying (implying 
failure), but that they succeeded, for some definition of success (see 
below).

The contemporary standard approach is from Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory: 
define 0 as the empty set, and the successor to n as the union of n and the 
set containing n:

0 = {} (the empty set) 
n + 1 = n ∪ {n}

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set-theoretic_definition_of_natural_numbers


 Our ancestors defined the fingers (or digits) as the set of numbers.
 Modern mathematicians have managed to enhance the definition
 quantitatively but not qualitatively.

So what?

This is not a problem for the use of numbers in science, engineering or 
mathematics (including computer science, which may be considered a branch of 
all three). There may be still a few holdouts who hope that Gödel is wrong 
and Russell's dream of being able to define all of mathematics in terms of 
logic can be resurrected, but everyone else has moved on, and don't consider 
it to be an embarrassment any more than it is an embarrassment that all of 
philosophy collapses in a heap when faced with solipsism.

We have no reason to expect that the natural numbers are anything less than 
absolutely fundamental and irreducible (as the Wikipedia article above 
puts it). It's remarkable that we can reduce all of mathematics to 
essentially a single axiom: the concept of the set.


-- 
Steve

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Re: Devanagari int literals [was Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

2015-07-21 Thread Marko Rauhamaa

Steven D'Aprano steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info:

 That's not the case. It's not so much that they stopped trying (implying 
 failure), but that they succeeded, for some definition of success (see 
 below).

 The contemporary standard approach is from Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory: 
 define 0 as the empty set, and the successor to n as the union of n and the 
 set containing n:

 0 = {} (the empty set) 
 n + 1 = n ∪ {n}

That definition barely captures the essence of what a number *is*. In
fact, there have been different formulations of natural numbers. For
example:

   0 = {}
   1 = {0}
   2 = {1}
   3 = {2}
   etc


Marko
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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

2015-07-21 Thread Steven D'Aprano

On Tuesday 21 July 2015 13:58, Rick Johnson wrote:

 But even if i am wrong, the worse thing i did was mis-
 interpret his and another post. But since he still owes me
 an apology for insulting my integrity, 

Someone insulted your integrity? Poor integrity, I hope it wasn't too upset.

 i'd say we're even.
 Funny thing is, no one called for Mark to apologize... GO
 FIGURE! I guess pets get preferential treatment.

Perhaps nobody else read Mark's post. Perhaps they didn't think he insulted 
your integrity. Perhaps they thought you don't have any integrity to be 
insulted. Perhaps they thought you deserved it. Perhaps they wrote a post 
critical of Mark but suffered a fatal heart attack just before they could 
hit send. Anything is possible.

I guess we'll just never know.



-- 
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Re: Devanagari int literals [was Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

2015-07-21 Thread Steven D'Aprano

On Tuesday 21 July 2015 13:30, Rustom Mody wrote:

 BTW my boys have just mailed me their latest:
 
 九.九九
 
 9.99
 
 Can some unicode/Chinese literate person inform me whether
 that ideograph is equivalent to roman '9' or roman 'nine'?
 

I don't speak or read Chinese, so I could be completely wrong, but my 
understanding is that Chinese does not distinguish between the numeral 9 and 
the word 'nine', they are both spelled the same, 九. I think that the 
distinction you are looking for doesn't really exist in Chinese.

However, 90 would not be written as nine-zero, 九零, but as nine-ten 九十. 
Ninety-one, I believe, would be written as nine-ten-nine: 九十一.

Decimal numbers, however, copy the European usage: 91.1 = 九一.一.

See also:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%B9%9D
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_numerals


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Re: Devanagari int literals [was Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

2015-07-21 Thread Marko Rauhamaa

Laura Creighton l...@openend.se:

 In a message of Mon, 20 Jul 2015 20:30:48 -0700, Rustom Mody writes:

Can some unicode/Chinese literate person inform me whether that
ideograph is equivalent to roman '9' or roman 'nine'?

 Ah, I don't understand you. What do you mean roman 'nine'? a phonetic
 way of saying things? What bankers use to help prevent forgeries?
 Something else?

This is getting deep. It is an embarrassing metamathematical fact that
numbers cannot be defined. At least, mathematicians gave up trying a
century ago.

   In mathematics, the essence of counting a set and finding a result n,
   is that it establishes a one to one correspondence (or bijection) of
   the set with the set of numbers {1, 2, ..., n}.
   URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counting#Counting_in_mathematics

Our ancestors defined the fingers (or digits) as the set of numbers.
Modern mathematicians have managed to enhance the definition
quantitatively but not qualitatively.


Marko
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Re: Devanagari int literals [was Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

2015-07-21 Thread Chris Angelico

On Tue, Jul 21, 2015 at 7:10 PM, Marko Rauhamaa ma...@pacujo.net wrote:
 This is getting deep. It is an embarrassing metamathematical fact that
 numbers cannot be defined. At least, mathematicians gave up trying a
 century ago.

In mathematics, the essence of counting a set and finding a result n,
is that it establishes a one to one correspondence (or bijection) of
the set with the set of numbers {1, 2, ..., n}.
URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counting#Counting_in_mathematics

AIUI, zero is defined as the cardinality of the empty set, one is
defined as the cardinality of the set containing the empty set, two is
defined as the cardinality of the set containing the empty set and the
set containing the set containing the empty set... which makes
mathematics the only language *more verbose* than the Shakespeare
Programming Language in its definition of fundamental constants.

ChrisA
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Re: Devanagari int literals [was Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

2015-07-21 Thread Rustom Mody

On Tuesday, July 21, 2015 at 9:13:49 AM UTC+5:30, Chris Angelico wrote:
 On Tue, Jul 21, 2015 at 1:30 PM, Rustom Mody wrote:
  BTW my boys have just mailed me their latest:
 
  九.九九
 
  9.99
 
  Can some unicode/Chinese literate person inform me whether
  that ideograph is equivalent to roman '9' or roman 'nine'?
 
 I'm not Chinese-literate, but I know how to dig up info from the
 Unicode side of things.
 
 '\u4e5d' CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-4E5D
 
 Thanks, very helpful.
 
 Perhaps slightly more useful:
 
 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%B9%9D
 
 But it still doesn't disambiguate digit vs word.
 
 Playing around with Google Translate suggests that it functions mostly
 like a digit; 九九 means Ninety-nine and 九八 means Ninety-eight. But
 I'll leave further confirmation to someone who fits your second
 description.
 
 ChrisA

Well Cant make much sense of it:

 import unicodedata as ud
 ud.numeric('२')
2.0
 ud.category('२')
'Nd'
 ud.numeric('九')
9.0
 ud.category('九')
'Lo'
 
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Re: Devanagari int literals [was Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

2015-07-21 Thread Laura Creighton

In a message of Mon, 20 Jul 2015 20:30:48 -0700, Rustom Mody writes:

BTW my boys have just mailed me their latest:

 九.九九

9.99

Can some unicode/Chinese literate person inform me whether
that ideograph is equivalent to roman '9' or roman 'nine'?

Ah, I don't understand you.  What do you mean roman 'nine'?  a
phonetic way of saying things?  What bankers use to help prevent
forgeries? Something else?

九 is a numberal.  The numberal 9.  For absolutely certain.  But since
I don't know what you mean by 'nine' it may mean that, as well.  九 is
not restricted to any particular dialect of Chinese -- if you speak
any chinese you will know what this means.  On the other hand the
pinyan (phonetic) way to pronounce numbers can vary between dialects.

Chinese has *many* ways of writing numbers, at least 4 I know about.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_numerals

Laura
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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

2015-07-20 Thread Steven D'Aprano

On Monday 20 July 2015 13:30, Ian Kelly wrote:

 On Sun, Jul 19, 2015 at 9:12 PM, Steven D'Aprano st...@pearwood.info
 wrote:
 On Mon, 20 Jul 2015 11:35 am, Rick Johnson wrote:

 I figured that was you *MARK LAWRENCE*. I shall add sock-puppeting
 to your many egregious offenses! And poorly executed sock-puppeting
 as well! You're a zero.

 Rick, what the hell are you talking about? Mark is using the same email
 address as he has always used (unlike a certain person who shall remain
 unnamed, but used to go by the names RR and Ranting Rick and possibly
 others).
 
 Not quite; one is @yahoo.co.uk, and the other is @gmail.com.

Ah, so they are. You're right, I was wrong, they're not the same email 
address. But still, accusations of sock-puppetry from a change in email 
provider is unreasonable, and I believe that Rick should acknowledge that he 
over-reacted.


 If the
 great Ranting Rick can't tell that these belong to the same person
 just based on the local part, then what chance do we mere mortals
 have?



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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

2015-07-20 Thread Michael Torrie

On 07/19/2015 11:33 PM, Michael Torrie wrote:
  For the most part,
 it's been good to hear from Cecil (there have been a few snarky posts)
 as he has learned python and really run with it.  I don't understand
 where your apparent frustration with Cecil is coming from.

Come to think of it, I can't think of but one post, maybe, where he was
short with someone, but not snarky.  I take that back.  Which is better
than me, and probably others!
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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

Mark Lawrence breamore...@yahoo.co.uk writes:
 ...
 So I most humbly suggest, as I may have hinted at once or twice
 earlier in this thread, that people either put up or shut up.

In another of your contributions to this thread, you spoke of another
alternative: do a bit of begging. That is what some of us are doing.

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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

Ian Kelly ian.g.ke...@gmail.com writes:

 On Sun, Jul 19, 2015 at 10:10 AM, Cecil Westerhof ce...@decebal.nl wrote:
 On Sunday 19 Jul 2015 15:42 CEST, Mark Lawrence wrote:

 On 19/07/2015 03:13, Terry Reedy wrote:
 On 7/18/2015 7:50 PM, Devin Jeanpierre wrote:
 to 2.7, surely bug fixes are also allowed?

 Of course, allowed.  But should they be made, and if so, by who?

 The people who want the fixes.

 Babies want clean diapers. So babies have to change diapers
 themselves?

 Poor analogy. Babies need others to change their diapers for them
 because they're not capable of doing it for themselves.

I believe Cecil was aware of this and wanted to stress:
not everyone who needs a fix is also able to backport a corresponding
patch.

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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

Mark Lawrence breamore...@yahoo.co.uk writes:

 On 19/07/2015 18:14, Cecil Westerhof wrote:
 On Sunday 19 Jul 2015 18:38 CEST, Mark Lawrence wrote:
 ...
 You think so? I think that a lot of people who are using 2.7 would
 like to have the fixes. They know how to use Python, but they would
 not now how to implement a patch. That is why I made this comment.


 I don't think so, I know.  If they want the patches that badly and
 can't do it themselves they'll have to grin and bear it, or do a bit
 of begging, or pay somebody to do it for them.

Well, there might be budget constraints and the difficulty
to find someone capable of doing a backport.

We are doing here some form of begging. Thus, we are in line with
your recommendations ;-)

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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

Mark Lawrence breamore...@yahoo.co.uk writes:

 On 19/07/2015 17:10, Cecil Westerhof wrote:
 On Sunday 19 Jul 2015 15:42 CEST, Mark Lawrence wrote:
 ...
 Babies want clean diapers. So babies have to change diapers
 themselves?


 That has to be the worst analogy I've ever read.  We are discussing
 backporting working patches, *NOT* having to go through the whole
 shooting match from scratch.

Nevertheless, the task is (usually) far from trivial.
Beside the pure functional aspect, you need at least also address
testing againt interference with other features, i.e. you need
detailed knowledge about Python's test suite and its setup.
This obviously is non trivial - as I have seen fixes break other things.

If C code is envolved, you need also understand Python's build environment
-- another huge requirement of specific knowledge. Especially, because
the Python build process must function on many platforms and typical
users only use a single one.

The first point causes me prefer external packages - where I (not
a community) decide about the extent of testing. It is also easy to
remove an external package should it really make problems.

The second point causes me to prefer working around problems envolving
C code rather than fixing it.

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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

2015-07-20 Thread Terry Reedy


On 7/19/2015 9:20 PM, Devin Jeanpierre wrote:


Search your logs for https://bugs.python.org/issue17094
http://bugs.python.org/issue5315

I was most frustrated by the first case --

 the patch was (informally) rejected

By 'the patch', I presume you mean current-frames-cleanup.patch
by Stefan Ring, who said it is certainly not the most complete 
solution, but it solves my problem.. It was reviewed a month later by a 
core dev, who said it had two defects.  Do you expect us to apply 
defective patches?



in favor of the right fix,


right is your word. Natali simply uploaded an alternate patch that did 
not have the defects cited.  It went through 4 versions, two by Pitrou, 
before the commit and close 2 months later, with the comment Hopefully 
there aren't any applications relying on the previous behaviour.


and the right fix was (informally) rejected because it changed behavior,

The bugfix was rejected *for both 2.7 and 3.3* in msg186011.  The 
rejection therefore does not indicate animus against 2.7 versus 3.x. The 
reason is that it did more than just fix the bug. When this is the case, 
we only apply to the upcoming release.  If we broke working code as a 
side-effect, as opposed to a direct effect, of a bugfix, many people 
would be frustrated. See some of the other comments in this thread.


Two years later, last May, you proposed and uploaded a patch with what 
looks to be a new and different approach.  It has been ignored.  In the 
absence of a core dev focused on 2.7, I expect that this will continue. 
Too bad you did not upload it in Feb 2013, before the review and fix 
started.


 and http://bugs.python.org/issue5315

Another fairly obscure issue for most of us. Five years ago, this was 
turned into a doc issue, but no patch was ever submitted for either 2.x 
or 3.x.  Again, no particular prejudice against 2.x.


In May, you posted a bugfix which so far has been ignored.  Not too 
surprising.  I submitted a ping and updated the versions.  If anyone 
responds, you might be asked for a patch against 3.4 or 3.5.


--
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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

Rick Johnson rantingrickjohn...@gmail.com writes:

 On Sunday, July 19, 2015 at 1:44:25 PM UTC-5, bream...@gmail.com wrote:
 No, it's simply that nobody can force volunteers to back
 port something when they're just not interested in doing
 the work, for whatever reason.  Hence my statement above,
 of which you have focused on the last eight words.

 Well i argue that the free labor *WOULD* exists *IF* the
 patching mechanism were more inclusive and intuitive.

Thinking of myself, I am not sure. Ensuring the quality of
a distribution goes far beyond a single bug fix. While I usually
are ready to share a bug fix I have found, I am reluctant to get
involved in the complete quality ensurance process (such as
the test suite, review process, style guides, ...). This would
require far more time than that for analysing and fixing the initial
problem. Thus, from my point of view, it calls for a division of labor --
where quality ensurance experts do the integration of my patch/backport.


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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

Rick Johnson rantingrickjohn...@gmail.com writes:

 On Sunday, July 19, 2015 at 12:54:34 AM UTC-5, dieter wrote:
 From my point of view: if you want help with fixing bugs,
 you must ensure that there is a high probability that
 those contributions really find their way into the main
 development lines. As I understand from other messages in
 this thread, this is also a problem with Python bug
 fixing.

 (Not sure who said this, so my apologies if the attribution
 is incorrect)
 
 Bug fixing is not something most programmers find enjoyable,
 at least not for long durations. I prefer to spend my time
 solving real world problems, and designing intuitive APIs,
 this is what brings me joy. 

This was me.

And I am like you. I do not hunt bugs I find in a bug tracker
but only bugs I get hit in real world problems.
But once hit, I usually find a solution (or work around)
and like to share it with others who might get hit in the future.
That's why I take the time to file bug reports (often with patches).

But when those bug reports and patches seem to be ignored by
the core development team - I look for other means, such as
external packages.


 Heck, there have been many times that i purposefully re-
 invented the wheel simply because solving the problem is
 much easier (and more enjoyable) than trying to understand
 another programmer's atrocious spaghetti code. Therefor, we
 should not be surprised that the bug list is so understaffed
 and lacks vigor.

In my experience (with other open source projects), I think
almost none of my patches was ever taken over without modifications.
In my view, the changes were usually of a cosmetic nature.
For me, this is fine - as long as the problem gets fixed.

 ...
 What is becoming apparent to me though, is that most of the
 complaints i had voiced (years ago) about the exclusive
 attitudes, horrible interface, and the burdensome workflow
 of submitting patches is contributing to the lack of
 interest in this process - and it seems i am not alone!

 I can remember twice getting excited about helping out, to
 only quickly become frustrated with the politics and
 interface. Why should i have to fight just to volunteer?

Experience like this (in another project) causes me to
be very reluctant to become a core contributor (in the sense
of actively fixing things in the core). You need a lot of knowledge
(coding conventions, test setup, change workflow, ...) whichs
goes far beyond the functionality of the fix -- and you
must be resilient, patient and maybe even fighting to get the work
accepted.

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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

2015-07-20 Thread Devin Jeanpierre

I think you're missing the line where I said all the relevant
conversation happened in IRC, and that you should refer to logs.

On Sun, Jul 19, 2015 at 11:25 PM, Terry Reedy tjre...@udel.edu wrote:
 On 7/19/2015 9:20 PM, Devin Jeanpierre wrote:

 Search your logs for https://bugs.python.org/issue17094
 http://bugs.python.org/issue5315

 I was most frustrated by the first case --

 the patch was (informally) rejected

 By 'the patch', I presume you mean current-frames-cleanup.patch
 by Stefan Ring, who said it is certainly not the most complete solution,
 but it solves my problem.. It was reviewed a month later by a core dev, who
 said it had two defects.  Do you expect us to apply defective patches?

No, I meant my patch. It was discussed in IRC, and I gave the search
term to grep for. (The issue URL.)

 in favor of the right fix,


 right is your word. Natali simply uploaded an alternate patch that did not
 have the defects cited.  It went through 4 versions, two by Pitrou, before
 the commit and close 2 months later, with the comment Hopefully there
 aren't any applications relying on the previous behaviour.

No, right is the word used by members of #python-dev, referrig to
Antoine's fix.

 Two years later, last May, you proposed and uploaded a patch with what looks
 to be a new and different approach.  It has been ignored.  In the absence of
 a core dev focused on 2.7, I expect that this will continue. Too bad you did
 not upload it in Feb 2013, before the review and fix started.

I'm not sure what you're implying here. It couldn't be helped.

 and http://bugs.python.org/issue5315

 Another fairly obscure issue for most of us. Five years ago, this was turned
 into a doc issue, but no patch was ever submitted for either 2.x or 3.x.
 Again, no particular prejudice against 2.x.

 In May, you posted a bugfix which so far has been ignored.  Not too
 surprising.  I submitted a ping and updated the versions.  If anyone
 responds, you might be asked for a patch against 3.4 or 3.5.

Again, the prejudice was expressed in IRC. It was ignored because you
can just use asyncio in 3.x, and because the bug was old.

-- Devin
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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

2015-07-20 Thread Mark Lawrence

On 20/07/2015 03:16, Rustom Mody wrote:

On Monday, July 20, 2015 at 7:16:50 AM UTC+5:30, Mark Lawrence wrote:

On 20/07/2015 02:20, Devin Jeanpierre wrote:

I don't like how this is being redirected to surely you
misunderstood or I don't believe you. The fact that some core devs
are hostile to 2.x development is really bleedingly obvious, you
shouldn't need quotes or context thrown at you. The rhetoric almost
always shies _just_ short of ceasing bugfixes (until 2020, when that
abruptly becomes a cracking good idea). e.g. in 2.7 is here until
2020, please don't call it a waste.

A couple of things.

First some core devs are hostile, actually some have stated that
they're simply not interested in 2.7 and will not work on it.

Second how has the thread got here, as it was originally asking about
back porting bug fixes from 3.x to 2.7? Further it said:-

quote
If the vast majority of Python programmers are focused on 2.7, why are
volunteers to help fix 2.7 bugs so scarce?
/quote

So I most humbly suggest, as I may have hinted at once or twice earlier
in this thread, that people either put up or shut up.

I just ran the following command
$ hg log --template {author|person}\n | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr

as giving all the committers to python in sorted order.
I get the list below.
Dont see any Mark Lawrence there
Of course I dont know hg at all well... Just picked up the above command from
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6126678/how-to-list-commiters-sorted-by-number-of-commits-commit-count

So... May I humbly ask where are your precious commits??

Thank you for showing your complete ignorance as to how Python works.

--
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask
what you can do for our language.

Mark Lawrence

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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

On Sunday, July 19, 2015 at 9:17:11 PM UTC-5, Rustom Mody wrote:


 List of python committers:
 -
  11081 Guido van Rossum
 [snip: long list]

Thanks for posting this list of names. I had put in a pyFOIA
request for this data a few years ago, but to my surprise, was
flat out denied. I'm not sure how exhaustive this list may be,
but publicly displaying the commit hierarchy within the Python
community is very import for those who may want to get involved.

[Talking to Mark Lawrence, Rustom said:]
 So... May I humbly ask where are your precious commits??

Thanks for putting Mark in his place. He has been brow
beating folks on this list (myself included) for years, and
i'll bet he now feels as tiny as D'Aprano did -- when GvR
scolded him for disrespecting a Noob on Python-ideas.

  Yeah, i was watching! 

  I'M *ALWAYS* WATCHING!

  ಠ_ಠ

Now that Mark's lack of commit cred has been exposed, we can
safely ignore his hollow and hypocritical bullying. And now
that he has been de-fanged, he will be forced to seek employment
elsewhere. Hmm, my suggestion is that he market himself as an
on-call peanut butter removal service. A venture that will
no doubt be successful, seeing that he has two heads up on
his competition! 
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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

2015-07-20 Thread Rustom Mody

On Tuesday, July 21, 2015 at 8:34:30 AM UTC+5:30, Rick Johnson wrote:
 On Sunday, July 19, 2015 at 9:17:11 PM UTC-5, Rustom Mody wrote:
 
 
  List of python committers:
  -
   11081 Guido van Rossum
  [snip: long list]
 
 Thanks for posting this list of names. I had put in a pyFOIA
 request for this data a few years ago, but to my surprise, was
 flat out denied. I'm not sure how exhaustive this list may be,
 but publicly displaying the commit hierarchy within the Python
 community is very import for those who may want to get involved.
 
 [Talking to Mark Lawrence, Rustom said:]
  So... May I humbly ask where are your precious commits??
 
 Thanks for putting Mark in his place. He has been brow
 beating folks on this list (myself included) for years, and
 i'll bet he now feels as tiny as D'Aprano did -- when GvR
 scolded him for disrespecting a Noob on Python-ideas.
 
   Yeah, i was watching! 
 
   I'M *ALWAYS* WATCHING!
 
   ಠ_ಠ
 
 Now that Mark's lack of commit cred has been exposed, we can
 safely ignore his hollow and hypocritical bullying. And now
 that he has been de-fanged, he will be forced to seek employment
 elsewhere. Hmm, my suggestion is that he market himself as an
 on-call peanut butter removal service. A venture that will
 no doubt be successful, seeing that he has two heads up on
 his competition!

Hey Rick!
Lets have a useful discussion
And cut the rhetoric
Please

[Chris already showed that this list is inaccurate -- probably related 
to hg not having sighoff distinct from commit like git]
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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

2015-07-20 Thread Chris Angelico

On Tue, Jul 21, 2015 at 1:15 PM, Rustom Mody rustompm...@gmail.com wrote:
 [Chris already showed that this list is inaccurate -- probably related
 to hg not having sighoff distinct from commit like git]

It's also the manner of workflow. If you want to accept patches and
have them acknowledged to their original authors, the patches need to
carry metadata identifying the authors. I went to the tracker and hit
Random Issue and got one with an attached file as the first hit:

http://bugs.python.org/issue12982
http://bugs.python.org/file26008/issue12982.diff

Repeated the exercise and won again:

http://bugs.python.org/issue4733
http://bugs.python.org/file12437/urlopen_text.diff

Notice how the patch files start straight in with content. There's no
authorship information retained.

By comparison, a patch created with 'git format-patch' and applied
with 'git am' starts with RFC 822 headers, provides a commit message,
and generally is intended as a way of transmitting a *commit*, rather
than simply some changes. I'm not overly familiar with Mercurial
workflows, but I think 'hg export' and 'hg import' give the same sort
of information; I tried on CPython and got this:

# HG changeset patch
# User Robert Collins rbtcoll...@hp.com
# Date 1436838700 -43200
#  Tue Jul 14 13:51:40 2015 +1200
# Branch 3.5
# Node ID 7021d46c490e8d9d3422737c69980dc1602f90db
# Parent  0127b0cad5ecb83c39ce58a4be27bf6d43a78d91
Issue #23661: unittest.mock side_effects can now be exceptions again.

This was a regression vs Python 3.4. Patch from Ignacio Rossi

diff -r 0127b0cad5ec -r 7021d46c490e Lib/unittest/mock.py
--- a/Lib/unittest/mock.py  Sat Jul 11 16:33:39 2015 -0700
+++ b/Lib/unittest/mock.py  Tue Jul 14 13:51:40 2015 +1200
@@ -506,7 +506,8 @@
 if delegated is None:

(chomp actual details)

Whether it's possible to have authorship retained or not, though, a
lot of patches can logically be credited to multiple people. Whose
name goes on it? With the CPython workflow, it's always the core
committer who applied it, nobody else. (That's consistent, at least.)
So the names in the log are of the people who have write access to the
repo, and nobody else.

ChrisA
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Re: Devanagari int literals [was Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

2015-07-20 Thread Rustom Mody

On Sunday, July 19, 2015 at 10:15:37 AM UTC+5:30, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
  JFTR: My kids (um... students) have just managed to add devanagari
  numerals to python.
  ie we can now do
  
  १ + २
  3
 
 That is actually quite awesome, and I would support a new feature that set
 the numeric characters to a particular script, e.g. Latin, Arabic,
 Devanagari, whatever, and printed them in that same script. It seems
 unfortunate that १ + २ prints as 3 rather than ३.

BTW my boys have just mailed me their latest:

 九.九九

9.99

Can some unicode/Chinese literate person inform me whether
that ideograph is equivalent to roman '9' or roman 'nine'?
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Re: Devanagari int literals [was Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

2015-07-20 Thread Chris Angelico

On Tue, Jul 21, 2015 at 1:30 PM, Rustom Mody rustompm...@gmail.com wrote:
 BTW my boys have just mailed me their latest:

 九.九九

 9.99

 Can some unicode/Chinese literate person inform me whether
 that ideograph is equivalent to roman '9' or roman 'nine'?

I'm not Chinese-literate, but I know how to dig up info from the
Unicode side of things.

'\u4e5d' CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-4E5D

Thanks, very helpful.

Perhaps slightly more useful:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%B9%9D

But it still doesn't disambiguate digit vs word.

Playing around with Google Translate suggests that it functions mostly
like a digit; 九九 means Ninety-nine and 九八 means Ninety-eight. But
I'll leave further confirmation to someone who fits your second
description.

ChrisA
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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

On Monday, July 20, 2015 at 12:59:53 AM UTC-5, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
  Not quite; one is @yahoo.co.uk, and the other is @gmail.com.
 
 Ah, so they are. You're right, I was wrong, they're not
 the same email address. But still, accusations of sock-
 puppetry from a change in email provider is unreasonable,
 and I believe that Rick should acknowledge that he over-
 reacted.

I'm not sure if i misinterpreted the puppetry, or not. I
thought Mark was hiding behind the bream account, but i'm
not so sure now. Weird things were happening yesterday with my
quotes (i even mentioned the strangeness in one of my
replies, check the archives).

But even if i am wrong, the worse thing i did was mis-
interpret his and another post. But since he still owes me
an apology for insulting my integrity, i'd say we're even.
Funny thing is, no one called for Mark to apologize... GO
FIGURE! I guess pets get preferential treatment.
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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

On Monday, July 20, 2015 at 1:30:03 AM UTC-5, dieter wrote: 
 Experience like this (in another project) causes me to be
 very reluctant to become a core contributor (in the sense
 of actively fixing things in the core). You need a lot of
 knowledge (coding conventions, test setup, change
 workflow, ...) whichs goes far beyond the functionality of
 the fix -- and you must be resilient, patient and maybe
 even fighting to get the work accepted.

Thanks for sharing your experiences. I hope many more will
come forward and do the same. We are obviously ignoring some
talented people out there, and as i stressed before, we need
to prevent further hemorrhaging of this talent. I know there
are tons of folks who will get involved if we can remove the
onerous barriers.
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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

2015-07-20 Thread Terry Reedy


On 7/20/2015 11:33 PM, Chris Angelico wrote:


It's also the manner of workflow. If you want to accept patches and
have them acknowledged to their original authors, the patches need to
carry metadata identifying the authors. Notice how the patch files start 
straight in with content. There's no
authorship information retained.

By comparison, a patch created with 'git format-patch' and applied
with 'git am' starts with RFC 822 headers, provides a commit message,
and generally is intended as a way of transmitting a *commit*, rather
than simply some changes. I'm not overly familiar with Mercurial
workflows, but I think 'hg export' and 'hg import' give the same sort
of information; I tried on CPython and got this:


hg has an option to produce git-format patches.  However, they do not 
work with the Rietveld code review tool, and so are discouraged.  I do 
not know if the extra information would survive an hg commit.


--
Terry Jan Reedy

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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

On Monday, July 20, 2015 at 1:47:00 AM UTC-5, dieter wrote:
 Thinking of myself, I am not sure. Ensuring the quality of
 a distribution goes far beyond a single bug fix. While I
 usually are ready to share a bug fix I have found, I am
 reluctant to get involved in the complete quality
 ensurance process (such as the test suite, review process,
 style guides, ...).

Of course. I believe there are many folks out there like
yourself, who come across this or that bug, but don't bother
sharing the patch because of the reluctance to deal with red
tape or fear of a brow beating.

Participation, on a regular basis, requires a special kind
of person with special talents. For example: Terry Reedy has
been working over at pybugs for years. I don't think
everyone wants to be, or can be, a Terry Reedy. But i do
believe the current system is presenting obstacles to those
that could offer help in whatever limited capacity they can
handle.


OUTLINE OF FOUR POSSIBLE LEVELS OF PARTICIPATION:

  LEVEL1: Anyone, no matter what coding skills they have,
  can bring attention to a problem, and allow someone else
  to write the code. HEY, I FOUND A PROBLEM - BLAH, BLAH,
  BLAH. Also, not all programmers are experts with the
  written word. And a poorly described problem can result in
  it never getting the attention is deserves. We not only
  need coders, we need writer who can peruse the complaints
  and reformat them for comprehension and coherency. We need
  a diversity of talent, and not just code monkey talent,
  all forms!

  LEVEL2: Even someone with sketchy knowledge of the fix
  can write up an outline, or a list of steps that could be
  taken, in order to fix the problem. Possibly pointing out
  some of the subtle bugs that may crop up if not carefully
  considered. Very few of us know *everything* about every
  module or dark corner of Python. For example, I've talked
  with a few grand masters, who had little or no knowledge
  of Tkinter or IDLE.

  LEVEL3: The next level would be to write draft code. Maybe
  the code would not even be considered professional. But
  it could serve as a rough draft that a more experienced
  programmer can build from.
  
  LEVEL4 The last level is a fully functioning patch. This
  would be written, or approved by, one of the trustees.

And even if the contributor can only participate at level1
or level2, if they find the process is smooth, then they are
more likely to participate again. And as they become more
experienced, will offer help at a higher level of expertise.
I know the wheel is being re-invented all the time, simply
because of the obstacles inherent in the patching process.
  
There needs to exist a linear path from bug to patch. We
don't want Terry Reedy wasting his expertise on the first
two or three levels, no, we need to place him at a level
where his talents are not wasted reading ridiculous feature
requests that will never go beyond level1 or level2.

My point is, we're unproductive because: (1) we're scaring
away intermediate and specialized talents (2) and we're mis-
applying the limited talent we do have.
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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

2015-07-20 Thread Terry Reedy


On 7/19/2015 6:19 PM, Terry Reedy wrote:


I, and others, have already made some changes to eliminate differences
that are unnecessary, at least for 2.7 versus 3.3+ or now 3.4+.


I just got smacked in the face by a difference I had not run into 
before.  I added about 10 lines to a test file is a section that is 
identical in 2.7 and 3.4+.  One line is

self.assertEqual(type(obj), intended class)
It failed in 2.7.

Quiz: when is the type of an instance not the class that the instance is 
an instance of.  (I expect Steven A. is raising his hand now.)


Give up?

Answer: When you write a class in 2.x without making it a subclass of 
object.


 class Class():
pass

 inst = Class()
 type(inst) is Class
False
 type(inst)
type 'instance'

Since I do not remember how to fix the assert, and was not prepared to 
make the class, in a file other than the one tested, new-style, I just 
commented it out.


This is an example of my claim that backports are best written by 
someone who is a current 2.x user with the particular 2.x knowledge 
needed.  I am not sure I ever had all the knowledge needed to handle the 
backport properly and I now I would prefer to forget about old-style 
classes.


--
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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?


On 7/18/2015 11:52 PM, Rustom Mody wrote:
among other things, a complaint about rejection of his desire for a 
mechanism for subsetting Python for teaching purposes.


Response 2: Core python is the most conservatively maintained part of 
Python.  Trying to change it radically, as distributed by PSF, is 
practically asking for rejection.  For subsetting, I suggest a different 
tack: filtering input before sending it to python and raise if it 
contains forbidden code.


After Response 1, I posted on the Devanagari thread a similar 
suggestion. I also posted an idea for implementing the idea by extending 
the internal reach of Idle extensions.  I limited the idea to the 
interactive shell because I could not immediately think of a use for 
filtering code before compiling.  Then I thought of this issue.  Among 
other things, code could be tokenized or parsed to an ast for filtering.


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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

2015-07-19 Thread Laura Creighton

In a message of Sat, 18 Jul 2015 19:36:33 -0400, Terry Reedy writes:
If the vast majority of Python programmers are focused on 2.7, why are 
volunteers to help fix 2.7 bugs so scarce?

Because volunteers to fix any bugs are scarce?  Because most people really
only think of bug fixing when they have one, and when they get that
one fixed they drop back into thinking that everything is perfect?

Does they all consider it perfect (or sufficient) as is?

Should the core developers who do not personally use 2.7 stop 
backporting, because no one cares if they do?

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy

In the tiny corner of industrial automation where I do a lot of work,
nobody is using 3.0.  It is not clear that this is ever going to change.
It would have to be driven by 'lack of people who know 2.x syntax'
or something like that. Not 'third party library compatibility' because
we really don't use them all that much.

In this corner of the world, the favourite language for developing in
is C (because we work close to hardware) and one of the things we like
about it, a whole lot, is that the language never changes out from
under you.  So there is great hope among industrial users of Python
that we can get a hold of a 'never going to change any more' version
of Python, and then code in that 'forever' knowing that a code change
isn't going to come along and break all our stuff.

Bug fixes aren't supposed to do this, of course, in the same way that
backporting of features do, but every so often something that was
introduced to fix bug X ends up breaking something else Y.  If the
consequences of a bug can be 10s of thousands of Euros lost, you
can see the appeal of 'this isn't going to happen any more'.

While nobody likes to get bit by bugs, there is some sort of fuzzy
belief out there that the bugs fixes that have gone into 2.7 are
more about things that we would never run into, and thus we get the
risk of change without the benefit of the bugfix.  This belief isn't
one that people substantiate -- it is 'just a feeling'.

So from this corner of the world, which admittedly is a very small corner,
yes, the news is 'Life is good.  Please leave us alone.'  This is in
large part, I think, due to the belief that 'if things aren't breaking,
things are perfect' which is completely untrue, but that's the way
people are thinking.

Laura
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Re: Devanagari int literals [was Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

2015-07-19 Thread Rustom Mody

On Sunday, July 19, 2015 at 12:46:26 PM UTC+5:30, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
 Chris Angelico:
 
  On Sun, Jul 19, 2015 at 2:45 PM, Steven D'Aprano  wrote:
  sys.setdigits('Devanagari')
 
  Easiest way to play with this would be a sys.displayhook, I think;
 
 I think the numeral selection is analogous to the number base:

Nice analogy

 
 0o10
8
 {:o}.format(0o10)
'10'
 
 what we need is:
 
 {:d/base({base})}.format(0o10, base=7)
'11'
 {:d/numeral('{num}').format(0o10, num=European)
'8'
 {:d/numeral('{num}').format(0o10, num=Roman)
'VIII'
 {:d/numeral('{num}').format(0o10, num=RomanLowerCase)
'viii'
 {:d/numeral('{num}').format(0o10, num=EasternArabic)
'٨'
 {:d/numeral('{num}').format(0o10, num=Devanagari)
'८'
 
 IOW, don't make it global.

But it is willy-nilly global.
Python:
 4+5
9
 

Unix bc:
$ bc
bc 1.06.95
Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2004, 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
For details type `warranty'. 
4+5
9
obase=8
4+5
11

IOW bc has two (global) variables ibase and obase for input and output base.
If you dont provide these as settable you hardwire them at 10 (8/16 in some
assembly languages)¹

Hopefully you will agree that python is more full-featured than bc and should
subsume bc functionality?

[Implementability is a second question and ease of implementability a third]

I believe numeral-language is similar

---
¹ When Ive played around with writing assemblers for toy machines, the hardwired
10-base has often been a nuisance. Of course one can in principle rebuild an 
REPL.
Repurposing the existing one is usually a far more palatable option (for me).
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Re: Devanagari int literals [was Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

2015-07-19 Thread Marko Rauhamaa

Rustom Mody rustompm...@gmail.com:

 On Sunday, July 19, 2015 at 12:46:26 PM UTC+5:30, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
 IOW, don't make it global.

 But it is willy-nilly global.
 Python:
 4+5
 9

The interactive mode is not all that interesting, but ok, make that
configurable as well.


Marko
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Re: Devanagari int literals [was Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]


On 7/19/2015 12:45 AM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:

On Sun, 19 Jul 2015 01:52 pm, Rustom Mody wrote:



JFTR: My kids (um... students) have just managed to add devanagari
numerals to python.
ie we can now do


१ + २

3


That is actually quite awesome, and I would support a new feature that set
the numeric characters to a particular script, e.g. Latin, Arabic,
Devanagari, whatever, and printed them in that same script. It seems
unfortunate that १ + २ prints as 3 rather than ३.

Python already, and has for many years, supported non-ASCII digits in string
conversions. This is in Python 2.4:

py int(u'१२')
12
py float(u'.१२')
0.12


so the feature goes back a long time.

I think that Python should allow int and float literals using any sequences
of digits from the same language, e.g. 12 or १२ but not १2.


This could be done easily by adding 10 modified productions from
https://docs.python.org/3/reference/lexical_analysis.html#integer-literals
for each language.  The problem of doing the above in the grammar, 
including the no mixing rule, is that is *would* take a separate set of 
productions for each language supported.


 One might have

an interpreter hook which displayed ints and floats using non-ASCII digits,
or one might even build that function into the intepreter, e.g. have a
global setting which tells ints and floats what digits to use, e.g.:

sys.setdigits('Devanagari')

I would support this, or something like this, as a language feature. If we
can write Python using Hindi identifiers, why not Hindi numerals?


As I remember, when non-ascii-digit inputs to int were last discussed 
(python-ideas?, pydev?), the possibility of expanding literals was 
mentioned.  As I remember, to idea was rejected or deferred on the basis 
that nearly all numbers used in production programs are read from files 
as numbers or converted by int or float.  The few numeric literals in 
programs could just as well be converted first, or the int expression 
could be used.


These true observations do not cover the shell, as in the examples 
above.  At some time, Guido has expresses the opinion that interactive 
console python should remain plain and basic and the fancier interaction 
features are the domain of replacement shells.


That brings me, anyway, to Idle.  It currently imitates console python 
in sending keystrokes as is to compile() and output streams as are to 
the tk display.  There are a couple of tracker issues claiming that this 
means that Idle does not imitate console python because a tk display 
does not treat backspace and return the same way simulated terminal 
consoles usually do.


While the bug claims have been rejected, I have been thinking that the 
Idle extension interface could and maybe should be extended so that 
extensions could filter and either transform or act on the input/output 
streams.


With a general mechanism in place, it would be trivial to use 
str.maketrans and str.translate in the input/output streams.  This would 
not disable ascii digit input, including mixtures in a single literal, 
but output has to all be in one digit set.  Selecting a language is a 
somewhat solved problem because last summer we added a extension 
configuration dialog that dynamically generates a dialog tab for each 
extension present.


--
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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?


On 7/18/2015 8:03 PM, Gary Herron wrote:

On 07/18/2015 04:36 PM, Terry Reedy wrote:

  I would like more viewpoints from 2.7 users.


I read that (incorrectly of course) and just had to ask:
How do you intend to extract a viewpoint from that last 7/10 of a user?

With apologies,


Some humor is definitely welcome.

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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

2015-07-19 Thread Gary Herron


On 07/18/2015 04:36 PM, Terry Reedy wrote:

  I would like more viewpoints from 2.7 users.


I read that (incorrectly of course) and just had to ask:
   How do you intend to extract a viewpoint from that last 7/10 of a user?

With apologies,

Gary Herron




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Department of Computer Science
DigiPen Institute of Technology
(425) 895-4418

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Re: Devanagari int literals [was Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

2015-07-19 Thread Anuradha Laxminarayan

On Sunday, July 19, 2015 at 10:15:37 AM UTC+5:30, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
 On Sun, 19 Jul 2015 01:52 pm, Rustom Mody wrote:

  Not to mention actively hostile attitude to discussions that could at the
  moment be tangential to current CPython. See (and whole thread)
  https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2015-May/033708.html

 I stand by my comments there. I have no disagreement with your aim to build
 a specialised language for teaching functional programming. I don't believe
 that should be Python.


  JFTR: My kids (um... students) have just managed to add devanagari
  numerals to python.
  ie we can now do
 
  १ + २
  3

 That is actually quite awesome, and I would support a new feature that set
 the numeric characters to a particular script, e.g. Latin, Arabic,
 Devanagari, whatever, and printed them in that same script. It seems
 unfortunate that १ + २ prints as 3 rather than ३.

Thanks. [I am part of this team]


 Python already, and has for many years, supported non-ASCII digits in string
 conversions. This is in Python 2.4:

 py int(u'१२')
 12
 py float(u'.१२')
 0.12


Very useful to know!


 so the feature goes back a long time.

 I think that Python should allow int and float literals using any sequences
 of digits from the same language, e.g. 12 or १२ but not १2. One might have
 an interpreter hook which displayed ints and floats using non-ASCII digits,
 or one might even build that function into the intepreter, e.g. have a
 global setting which tells ints and floats what digits to use, e.g.:

 sys.setdigits('Devanagari')



Currently our code works with UTF-8 byte sequences not unicode codepoints
because thats how tokenizer.c is structured: messy and not generalizable 
(easily) to things beyond devanagari.  How far this can be improved (without 
too deep surgery) is not quite clear yet.

In other words, this generality is nice to talk about but easier said than done 
at the moment.
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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?


On 7/18/2015 11:52 PM, Rustom Mody wrote:


Not to mention actively hostile attitude to discussions that could at the
moment be tangential to current CPython. See (and whole thread)
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2015-May/033708.html


Rustom, I think this is grossly unfair.  Python-ideas was started by 
Guido as a forum for ideas about *future* versions of Python.  Your post 
was about teaching Python,which is something different, as are lost of 
other Python-related topics. It would have fit either this list or 
edu-sig better.


Your post
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2015-May/033661.html
started a thread with nearly 40 responses, which is far more than 
average.  Thou doth protest too much. This

https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2015-May/thread.html#33672
is the list for May; there might be a few more in June.

To the extent that you were (vaguely) proposing a change to core python 
itself, by splitting it up into 'teachpacks' (whatever those are) and 
'concentric rings', the idea was quickly rejected. It is too 
specialized, being aimed as one use, and impractically complicated for a 
mostly volunteer development group.  It is the sort of thing one might 
do with a $5 million grant.


Beyond that, the thread veered ogf onto topics that even you labelled 
off-topic.  Yes, we are hostile to prolonged off-topic discussions. 
They detract from the purpose of the list.


--
Terry Jan Reedy

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Re: Devanagari int literals [was Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?]

2015-07-19 Thread Marko Rauhamaa

Chris Angelico ros...@gmail.com:

 On Sun, Jul 19, 2015 at 2:45 PM, Steven D'Aprano st...@pearwood.info wrote:
 sys.setdigits('Devanagari')

 Easiest way to play with this would be a sys.displayhook, I think;

I think the numeral selection is analogous to the number base:

0o10
   8
{:o}.format(0o10)
   '10'

what we need is:

{:d/base({base})}.format(0o10, base=7)
   '11'
{:d/numeral('{num}').format(0o10, num=European)
   '8'
{:d/numeral('{num}').format(0o10, num=Roman)
   'VIII'
{:d/numeral('{num}').format(0o10, num=RomanLowerCase)
   'viii'
{:d/numeral('{num}').format(0o10, num=EasternArabic)
   '٨'
{:d/numeral('{num}').format(0o10, num=Devanagari)
   '८'

IOW, don't make it global.


Marko
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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?


On 19/07/2015 03:13, Terry Reedy wrote:

On 7/18/2015 7:50 PM, Devin Jeanpierre wrote:

to 2.7, surely bug fixes are also allowed?


Of course, allowed.  But should they be made, and if so, by who?


The people who want the fixes.




I have contributed both performance improvements and bug fixes to 2.7.
In my experience, the problem is not the lack of contributors, it's
the lack of code reviewers.


I understand the general problem quite well.  But feeling that one would
have to do a 2.7 backport after writing, editing, or reviewing a 3.x
patch can discourage doing a review in the first place. I am at that
point now with respect to Idle patches.


Do the work with the 3.x patch and finish.  Let somebody who needs the 
patch for 2.7 do the work.  If nobody steps up to the mark that's not 
Terry Reedy's problem, you've done way more than your fair share over 
the years.


--
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask
what you can do for our language.

Mark Lawrence

--
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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?


On 19/07/2015 04:45, Paul Rubin wrote:

Terry Reedy tjre...@udel.edu writes:

I am suggesting that if there are 10x as many 2.7only programmers as
3.xonly programmers, and none of the 2.7 programmers is willing to do
the backport *of an already accepted patch*, then maybe it should not
be done at all.


The patch acceptance/approval process is frankly daunting.



Correct, which is why PEP 0462 -- Core development workflow automation 
for CPython https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0462/, PEP 0474 -- 
Creating forge.python.org https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0474/ and 
a separate core-workflow mailing list exist.


Admittedly things had stalled but I understand that they're being picked 
up again.


--
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask
what you can do for our language.

Mark Lawrence

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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?


On 19/07/2015 04:52, Rustom Mody wrote:


Not to mention actively hostile attitude to discussions that could at the
moment be tangential to current CPython. See (and whole thread)
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2015-May/033708.html



This https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2015-May/033686.html 
is actively hostile?  Sour grapes springs to my mind.


--
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask
what you can do for our language.

Mark Lawrence

--
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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

2015-07-19 Thread Steven D'Aprano

On Sun, 19 Jul 2015 07:27 pm, Laura Creighton wrote:

 In the tiny corner of industrial automation where I do a lot of work,
 nobody is using 3.0.

I should hope not, because 3.0 was rubbish and is unsupported :-)

I expect you mean 3.x in general.


 It is not clear that this is ever going to change. 
 It would have to be driven by 'lack of people who know 2.x syntax'
 or something like that. Not 'third party library compatibility' because
 we really don't use them all that much.
 
 In this corner of the world, the favourite language for developing in
 is C (because we work close to hardware) and one of the things we like
 about it, a whole lot, is that the language never changes out from
 under you.

Bug for bug compatible back to the 1970s, right? :-)

I sympathise, really I do. Particularly in the application space (Firefox,
I'm looking at you) I'm really fed up with every security update breaking
functionality, removing features, and adding anti-features.


 So there is great hope among industrial users of Python 
 that we can get a hold of a 'never going to change any more' version
 of Python, and then code in that 'forever' knowing that a code change
 isn't going to come along and break all our stuff.

Presumably they like the 2.7 features too much to go back to an even older
version. Because 2.5 or even 1.5 are pretty stable now.

I'm not kidding about 1.5, a year or two ago there was (so I'm told) a
fellow at PyCon in the US who was still using 1.5. If it ain't broke,
don't fix it -- he wasn't concerned about security updates, or new
features, he just needed to keep his legacy applications running.

I get it, I really do, and so do the core developers. (Well, most of them,
and certainly Guido.) It cannot be said often enough and loudly enough that
if you find yourself in the lucky position where you don't need to care
about security updates, bug fixes or new functionality, there is absolutely
nothing wrong with using an old, unmaintained, stable version forever.



-- 
Steven

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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?


On 19/07/2015 06:53, dieter wrote:

Mark Lawrence breamore...@yahoo.co.uk writes:

...

If the vast majority of Python programmers are focused on 2.7, why are
volunteers to help fix 2.7 bugs so scarce?


I have not done much work related to Python bug fixing. But, I had
bad experience with other open source projects: many of my patches
(and bug reports) have been ignored over decades. This caused me
to change my attitude: I now report bugs (sometimes with patches)
and publish a potential solution in a separate package
(-- dm.zopepatches.*, dm.zodbpatches.*). This way, affected
people can use a solution even if the core developpers don't care.

 From my point of view: if you want help with fixing bugs,
you must ensure that there is a high probability that those contributions
really find their way into the main development lines.
As I understand from other messages in this thread, this is also
a problem with Python bug fixing.



The entire workflow is the problem.  This is now being addressed, see my 
earlier reply to Paul Rubin.


--
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask
what you can do for our language.

Mark Lawrence

--
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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

2015-07-19 Thread Rustom Mody

On Sunday, July 19, 2015 at 2:42:41 PM UTC+5:30, Terry Reedy wrote:
 On 7/18/2015 11:52 PM, Rustom Mody wrote:
 among other things, a complaint about rejection of his desire for a 
 mechanism for subsetting Python for teaching purposes.

Sorry Terry if the compliant sounded louder than the answer. You asked:
 If the vast majority of Python programmers are focused on 2.7, why are
 volunteers to help fix 2.7 bugs so scarce? 

As someone who's been associated in one way or other with teaching for near 3 
decades, I'd say that of the two factors which destroy an education institute --
bar to entry too high, bar to entry too low  -- the second is by far the more
dangerous.

I believe open source is no different.  If every patch is to be accepted (or 
even given a polite answer) there will be no remaining working code.
And this will become more true the more the project is successful.

Super successful projects like the linux kernel are that way because the top 
guys are ruthlessly meritocratic: If your submission is poor you are told 
Your code is shit

If you persist, the Your code shortens to You

As I said it to Paul: I am thankful that python is meritocratic

As for that specific exchange I would rather not flog that horse further
[in public at least -- we can continue off list]
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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

2015-07-19 Thread Rick Johnson

On Sunday, July 19, 2015 at 12:54:34 AM UTC-5, dieter wrote:
 From my point of view: if you want help with fixing bugs,
 you must ensure that there is a high probability that
 those contributions really find their way into the main
 development lines. As I understand from other messages in
 this thread, this is also a problem with Python bug
 fixing.

(Not sure who said this, so my apologies if the attribution
is incorrect)

Bug fixing is not something most programmers find enjoyable,
at least not for long durations. I prefer to spend my time
solving real world problems, and designing intuitive APIs,
this is what brings me joy. 

Heck, there have been many times that i purposefully re-
invented the wheel simply because solving the problem is
much easier (and more enjoyable) than trying to understand
another programmer's atrocious spaghetti code. Therefor, we
should not be surprised that the bug list is so understaffed
and lacks vigor.

What is becoming apparent to me though, is that most of the
complaints i had voiced (years ago) about the exclusive
attitudes, horrible interface, and the burdensome workflow
of submitting patches is contributing to the lack of
interest in this process - and it seems i am not alone!

I can remember twice getting excited about helping out, to
only quickly become frustrated with the politics and
interface. Why should i have to fight just to volunteer?
What's the point? The whole system is self defeating.

Time for some introspection folks.
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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

2015-07-19 Thread Laura Creighton

In a message of Sun, 19 Jul 2015 09:29:11 -0600, Ian Kelly writes:
I think this is an unrealistic and unattainable goal. Even if you stop
patching your Python 2.7 version altogether, what about the
environment that it runs in? Are you going to stop patching the OS
forever? Are you going to fix the current machine architecture exactly
as it is, forever? I don't know if industrial code uses a network much
or at all, but if it does, are you never going to upgrade your network
infrastructure?

There is clearly some wishful thinking going around here, but
in terms of having the same machine architecture forever ... well, my
friend the hardware guy can make you a board that you can plug your
old perfectly working, reliable 1970s tech machines into -- because they
really want to be plugged into a pdp-11 running RSX-11.  Then we fake
things using Python to simulate enough RSX-11 to keep on running.

We figure the machines will still be running long after we are dead.

Laura
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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?


On 19/07/2015 23:10, Cecil Westerhof wrote:

On Sunday 19 Jul 2015 22:28 CEST, Mark Lawrence wrote:


On 19/07/2015 21:05, Cecil Westerhof wrote:

On Sunday 19 Jul 2015 21:01 CEST, Ian Kelly wrote:


On Sun, Jul 19, 2015 at 10:10 AM, Cecil Westerhof ce...@decebal.nl wrote:

On Sunday 19 Jul 2015 15:42 CEST, Mark Lawrence wrote:


On 19/07/2015 03:13, Terry Reedy wrote:

On 7/18/2015 7:50 PM, Devin Jeanpierre wrote:

to 2.7, surely bug fixes are also allowed?


Of course, allowed. But should they be made, and if so, by who?


The people who want the fixes.


Babies want clean diapers. So babies have to change diapers
themselves?


Poor analogy. Babies need others to change their diapers for them
because they're not capable of doing it for themselves.


That is why I think it is good analogy. I think that most of the
users of 2.7 who would be delighted with fixes would have no idea
how to get those fixes into 2.7.



They could try reading the development guide to start with, or is
that also too much to ask?


My impression is that you and some other people are in an ivory tower
and find it very cosy.

It reminds me about the man on dry land who responded to the person
who fell in water and shouted
 “Help, I cannot swim!”
with
 “Why are you screaming?
  I cannot swim also.
  Do you hear me yelling about it?



You are now suggesting that people shouldn't even bother reading the 
develoment guide, just great.  Do they have to do anything themselves to 
get patches through?  Presumably the core devs give up their paid work, 
holidays, families, other hobbies and the like, just so some bunch of 
lazy, bone idle gits can get what they want, for nothing, when it suits 
them?  It appears that babies aren't the only people who need their 
nappies changing around here.


--
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask
what you can do for our language.

Mark Lawrence

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Re: Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?