On 6 Sep 2011, at 21:18, Martin v. Löwis wrote: >>> Perhaps I missed something early on, but why are we proposing >>> removing a function which (presumably) is stable and tested and >>> works and is not broken? What maintenance is needed here? >> >> >> The maintenance burden is on other implementations. > > It's not a maintenance burden (at least not in the sense in which > I understand the word "maintenance" - as an ongoing effort). When > they implement it once, the implementation can likely stay forever, > unmodified.
Ok, burden rather than "maintenance" burden. > >> Even if there is >> no maintenance burden for CPython having useless methods simply >> because it is less effort to leave them in place creates work for >> new implementations wanting to be fully compatible. > > That's true. > > However, that alone is not enough reason to remove the feature, IMO. > The effort that is saved is not only on the developers of CPython, > but also on users of the feature. My claim is that for any little-used > feature, removing it costs more time world-wide than re-implementing > it in 10 alternative Python implementations (with the number 10 drawn > out of blue air), because of the cost of changing the applications that > actually do use the feature. > Which applications? I'm not sure the number of applications using str.swapcase gets even as high as ten. > With the switch to Python 3, there would have been a chance to remove > little-used features. IMO, the next such chance is with Python 4. > It could be useful to start collecting little-used features that might > be removed with Python 4 - which I don't expect until 2020. We still have our standard deprecation policy that we can follow in Python 3. We don't have to wait until Python 4 to remove things. Changing semantics or syntax is harder because you can't really deprecate. Just removing methods is straightforward. MIchael > > Regards, > Martin > -- http://www.voidspace.org.uk/ May you do good and not evil May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others May you share freely, never taking more than you give. -- the sqlite blessing http://www.sqlite.org/different.html _______________________________________________ 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
