[Python-3000] [Python-ideas] Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!

[Mike Meyer]

On Sun, 03 Feb 2008 11:45:38 +1300 Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:

> Mike Meyer wrote:
> 
> > And - at least in my experience - chances are good that nothing but
> > the simplest scripts will work on multiple versions anyway, because
> > they don't have the same set of third party - or possibly even builtin
> > - modules installed, unless someone took care to make sure that
> > exactly that happened, and even then the scripts generally only moved
> > one direction.
> But at least you *can* set things up and write scripts
> so that the same code works across versions.

Upwards, anyway. But I find that, unless one organization is
maintaining all of them (meaning either your system has no stock
python install, or you're using it), you wind up with multiple python
installations and scripts that only work on one as a matter of course,
because that's easier than trying to make real applications work on
all of them.

> It's going to be impossible, or at least very difficult, to write
> code that works unchanged in both 2.x and 3.x.

Which in practice - at least on the applications I work on - is more a
matter of semantics than anything else. When we decide to switch to
3.x, we'll do exactly what we do for going to a new 2.Y, or a new
version of some third party library we use: create a new python build
with the libraries and tools we need, and a new application
distribution to go with it, then run them both through the qa cycle
until they pass, and we can put them in production.

    <mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>		http://www.mired.org/consulting.html
Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information.