Raymond Hettinger wrote: >>Deprecation means your code will still work I hope every book that >>documents "except:" also adds "but don't use this except under very >>special circumstances". >> >>I think you're overreacting (again), Raymond. 3.0 will be much more >>successful if we can introduce many of its features into 2.x. Many of >>those features are in fact improvements of the language even if they >>break old code. We're trying to balance between breaking old code and >>introducing new features; deprecation is the accepted way to do this.
> Fredrik, please speak up. Someone should represent the users here. I'm > reached my limit on how much time I can devote to thinking out the > implications of these proposals. Someone else needs to "overreact". How about a middle of the road (or there abouts) opinion from an average user? Just my 2 cents anyways. I get the impression that just how much existing code will work or not work in 3.0 is still fairly up in the air. Python 3.0 still quite a ways off from what I understand. So to me.. depreciating anything at this time that's not going to be removed *before* Python 3.0 is possibly jumping the gun a bit. (IMHO) It definitely makes since to depreciate anything that will be removed prior to Python 3.0. And to also document anything that will be changed in 3.0. (but not depreciate yet) If/when it is decided (maybe it already has) that a smooth transition can be made between 2.x and 3.0 with a high degree of backwards compatibility, then depreciating 2.x features that will be removed from 3.0 makes since at some point but maybe not in 2.5. If it turns out that the amount of changes in 3.0 are such as to be a "New but non backwards compatible version of Python" with a lot of really great new features. Then depreciating items in 2.x that will not be removed from 2.x seems like it gives a since of false hope. It might be better to just document the differences (but not depreciate them) and make a clean break. Or to put it another way... having a lot of depreciated items in the final 2.x version may give a message 2.x is flawed, yet it may not be possible for many programs to move to 3.0 easily for some time if there are a lot of large changes. My opinion is... I would rather see the final version of 2.x not have any depreciated items and efforts be made to make it the best and most dependable 2.x version that will be around for a while. And then have Python 3.0 be a new beginning and an open book without the backwards compatible chains holding it back. That dosen't mean it won't be, I think it's just too soon to tell to what degree. At this time the efforts towards 3.0 seem to be towards those improvements that may be included in some future version of 2.x which is great. Is it possible the big changes have yet to be considered for Python 3.0? Cheers, Ron _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com