[Python-ideas] Please reconsider the Boolean evaluation of midnight

[Paul Moore]

On 5 March 2014 13:10, Shai Berger <shai at platonix.com> wrote:
> On Wednesday 05 March 2014 14:54:27 Paul Moore wrote:
>>
>> And FWIW, my opinion is that the problem is not worth a compatibility
>> break, because it's so easily solved (and the fixed code is probably
>> an improvement in any case).
>
> Ah, but it is only easily solved once it is detected; the behavior causes bugs
> that surface once in a blue moon (in production, and then they cannot be
> reproduced by developers who, usually, do not work at midnight).

That's a fair point. But your deprecation suggestion doesn't seem to
help this, unless you expect (in a realistic timescale) to be able to
drop support for Python <3.7. Your users (on say 2.7 or 3.3) will
still get bugs, and now your developers (using 3.7) won't even be able
to reproduce the issue by staying up till midnight. And once they do
find the bug they will still have to fix it by an explicit test.

Again, I'm not saying the current behaviour is sensible, but I doubt
the work to fix it will benefit anyone in practice.

Paul.