[Python-ideas] Smoothing transition to Python 3

[tritium-list at sdamon.com]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Python-ideas [mailto:python-ideas-bounces+tritium-
> list=sdamon.com at python.org] On Behalf Of Neil Schemenauer
> Sent: Saturday, June 4, 2016 4:27 AM
> To: python-ideas at python.org
> Subject: Re: [Python-ideas] Smoothing transition to Python 3
> 
> On 2016-06-04, tritium-list at sdamon.com wrote:
> > In fact most of the things you list here are the GOOD ideas
> > that python 3 enforces that reduces bugs when avoided in python 2.
> 
> Sure, and I'm not proposing that standard Python 3.x change the
> behavior.
> 
> > What would actually help the transition, in my world-view at least is
> >
> > * A bytes type like the string type in python 2 (*without implicit
> > conversion!*) There are too many real world use cases that the bytes
type
> > makes painful, including anything dealing with networking.
> 
> The Python 3 bytes type should gain whatever features it needs to
> make things not painful.  The %-based formating in 3.5 is a big one.
> Is there something else you miss?
> 

b'Foo'[0] returning b'F' instead of the int 70

> > * an alias to the string type named 'unicode' (this just makes polyglot
a
> > whole heck of a lot less stressful... yes I do this myself, it's
annoying,
> > if it was there by default, like bytes is in 2.7, it would make life a
lot
> > easier.  One just never just never references `str`)
> 
> Maybe too late now but there should have been 'unicode',
> 'basestring' as aliases for 'str'.
> 
> > * a "magic" mapping from old to new module names.  In my experience,
> this is
> > actually a bigger pain than it looks.
> 
> I would like to add this to my "pragmatic" version.
> 
> > The general response was the theme of the entire python 3
> > transition story:  "I don't see the value added."
> 
> Yes, and here we are.  Python 3 is not yet winning and I'm not sure
> it will.  I believe Dropbox, Facebook and Google are all still using
> Python 2.  If porting code was so easy, why are they not moved over?
> I see VMWare released some new IoT SDK:
> 
>     https://github.com/vmware/liota
> 
> This is new code, written this year.  It is not compatible with
> Python 3 as far as I see.  I can't understand why people don't see
> we have a problem.
> 
>   Neil
> _______________________________________________
> Python-ideas mailing list
> Python-ideas at python.org
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas
> Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/