On Sat, Jun 28, 2008 at 1:30 AM, tomer filiba <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Jun 28, 12:56 am, "Guido van Rossum" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> No, it could just be a harmless typo in a long argument list. > > to elaborate on this point a little, i came across this error when i > ported my code to 2.4. i used the optparse class which takes 10's of > kwargs, and it turned out i'd given the same parameter twice (the > infamous copy-paste problem). > > so on the one hand, it was a harmless typo (because the latest > instance was taken). on the other hand, it's a good thing i tested it > on 2.4, or i'd never notice the repeated argument, which may have led > to weird runtime errors (if the order of the params was changed). > > i'd be in favor of fixing this in 2.5, just to eliminate possibly hard- > to-debug runtime errors. since it's a syntax error, it would be early- > noticed when the code is first run/imported, and it wouldn't require > the original author of the code to fix.
But your anecdote is exactly why I don't want it fixed in 2.5. Your code was working, the typo was harmless. I don't want upgrades from 2.5.2 to 2.5.3 (or any x.y.z to x.y.(z+1)) to break code that was working before the upgrade! This is a principle we've adopted for such point-point upgrades for a long time. Also note that it took a long time before this was first reported, so it's not exactly like it's an important or frequent problem. -- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/) _______________________________________________ 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
