[Python-Dev] A house upon the sand

[Greg Ward]

On 29 November 2000, Tim Peters said:
> [Guido]
> > ...
> > Because of its importance, the deprecation time of the string module
> > will be longer than that of most deprecated modules.  I expect it
> > won't be removed until Python 3000.
> 
> I see nothing in the 2.0 docs, code, or "what's new" web pages saying that
> it's deprecated.  So I don't think you can even start the clock on this one
> before 2.1 (a fuzzy stmt on the web page for the unused 1.6 release doesn't
> count ...).

FWIW, I would argue against *ever* removing (much less "deprecating",
ie. threatening to remove) the string module.  To a rough approximation,
every piece of Python code in existence code prior to Python 1.6 depends
on the string module.  I for one do not want to have to change all
occurences of string.foo(x) to x.foo() -- it just doesn't buy enough to
make it worth changing all that code.  

Not only does the amount of code to change mean the change would be
non-trivial, it's not always the right thing, especially if you happen
to be one of the people who dislikes the "delim.join(list)" idiom.  (I'm
still undecided.)

        Greg