[Python-Dev] PEP 414

[Yury Selivanov]

On 2012-03-01, at 5:52 PM, Armin Ronacher wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> On 3/1/12 10:38 PM, Yury Selivanov wrote:
>> Sorry if I sounded like 'attacking' you.  I certainly had no such
>> intention, as I believe nobody on this list.
> Sorry if I sound cranky but I got that impression from the responses
> here (which are greatly different from the responses I got on other
> communication channels and by peers).  You were just the unlucky mail I
> responded to :-)

It's OK ;)

>> But if you'd just stuck to the point, without touching very 
>> controversial  topics of what version of python is a good choice 
>> and what is a bad, with full review of all porting scenarios with 
>> well-thought set of benchmarks, nobody would ever call your PEP 
>> "polemic".
> I tried my best but obviously it was not good enough to please
> everybody.  In all honesty I did not expect that such a small change
> would spawn such a great discussion.  After all what we're discussing
> here is the introduction of one letter to literals :-)


Well, unfortunately it's not that simple from the standpoint of how
this change will be perceived by the community.  If we have u'' syntax
in python 3, will people even understand what is the key difference from 
python 2?  Will the internet be polluted with weird source-code targeted 
only for python3, but with the wide use of u''?  When to deprecate it,
and will it ever be deprecated (as everybody is already tired with all
this)?  Will it further strengthen the common misbelief the porting is
hard (as for the many of the projects it is not), or that the right way
it to have one code-base for all versions?  

And that's just the beginning of such questions.  And when this PEP was
suddenly approved, many of us felt that all those questions are not
answered and were not even discussed.

-
Yury