> > The most important reason for the patch is that looking at the context > > diff will provide an objective look at how real code will look before > > and after the change. This would make subsequent discussions > > substantially more informed and less anecdotal. > > No, you're just artificially trying to raise the bar for Python 3.0 > proposals to an unreasonable height.
Not really. I'm mostly for the proposal (+0), but am certain the conversation about the proposal would be substantially more informed if we had a side-by-side comparison of what real-world code looks like before and after the change. There are not too many instances of str.find() in the library and it is an easy patch to make. I'm just asking for a basic, objective investigative tool. Unlike more complex proposals, this one doesn't rely on any new functionality. It just says don't use X anymore. That makes it particularly easy to investigate in an objective way. BTW, this isn't unprecedented. We're already done it once when backticks got slated for removal in 3.0. All instances of it got changed in the standard library. As a result of the patch, we were able to 1) get an idea of how much work it took, 2) determine every category of use case, 3) learn that the resulting code was more beautiful, readable, and only microscopically slower, 4) learn about a handful of cases that were unexpectedly difficult to convert, and 5) update the library to be an example of what we think modern code looks like. That patch painlessly informed the decision making and validated that we were doing the right thing. The premise of Terry's proposal is that Python code is better when str.find() is not used. This is a testable proposition. Why not use the wealth of data at our fingertips to augment a priori reasoning and anecdotes. I'm not at all arguing against the proposal; I'm just asking for a thoughtful design process. Raymond P.S. Josiah was not alone. The comp.lang.python discussion had other posts expressing distaste for raising exceptions instead of using return codes. While I don't feel the same way, I don't think the respondants should be ignored. "Those people who love sausage and respect the law should not watch either one being made." _______________________________________________ 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
