[Python-Dev] breaking list.append()

[Ken Manheimer]

On Tue, 29 Feb 2000, Greg Stein wrote:

> On Tue, 29 Feb 2000, Ken Manheimer wrote:
> >...
> > I agree with mark.  Why the sudden rush??  It seems to me to be unfair to
> > make such a change - one that will break peoples code - without advanced
> > warning, which typically is handled by a deprecation period.  There *are*
> > going to be people who won't be informed of the change in the short span
> > of less than a single release. Just because it won't cause you pain isn't
> > a good reason to disregard the pain of those that will suffer,
> > particularly when you can do something relatively low-cost to avoid it.
> 
> Sudden rush?!?
> 
> Mark said he knew about it for a couple years. Same here. It was a long
> while ago that .append()'s semantics were specified to "no longer" accept
> multiple arguments.
> 
> I see in the HISTORY file, that changes were made to Python 1.4 (October,
> 1996) to avoid calling append() with multiple arguments.
> 
> So, that is over three years that append() has had multiple-args
> deprecated. There was probably discussion even before that, but I can't
> seem to find something to quote. Seems like plenty of time -- far from
> rushed.

None the less, for those practicing it, the incorrectness of it will be
fresh news.  I would be less sympathetic with them if there was recent
warning, eg, the schedule for changing it in the next release was part of
the current release.  But if you tell somebody you're going to change
something, and then don't for a few years, you probably need to renew the
warning before you make the change.  Don't you think so?  Why not?

Ken
klm@digicool.com