On Sun, Dec 20, 2015 at 3:05 PM, Emanuel Barry <vgr...@live.ca> wrote:
> From: gu...@python.org > > > I'm just curious on the backward compatibility impact. > > I'm just curious on the number of programs depending on the repr() of any > object at all in production (not counting tests). I could be wrong, but it > seems foolish to rely on that, especially since this is something that we > *can* change on an (almost) arbitrary basis. IMO, the repr() is meant to > aid the programmer - not specifying keyword arguments here does quite the > opposite of that :) > Not sure if you meant that as a rhetorical question or sarcastically. While you're right that ideally changing the repr() of an object shouldn't affect production work, in practice it can break any number of things, for example over-specified unit tests or poor integrations that end up parsing the string (perhaps in a different language than Python). We've encountered such issues many times in the past (for example, massive doctest breakage when we randomized the string hash) so we have to at least consider the possibility. In this case I expect there will be little effect, but it doesn't hurt asking around -- who knows what someone reading this remembers (besides asking pedantic questions :-). -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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