PEP 238 (revised)

[Peter Mayne]

"Joshua Macy" <l0819m0v0smfm001 at sneakemail.com> wrote in message
news:3B61E456.78DFE802 at sneakemail.com...
> Paul Boddie wrote:
> >
> > But possibly the first thing anyone with any investment in the
> > language should be thinking upon starting to read the PEP is: "How on
> > Earth am I going to know what needs changing, and how much time and
> > money am I going to be spending to adapt to this?"
> >
>
>   It seems to me that if upon reading the PEP someone thinks "How on
> Earth am I going to know what needs changing?", he is almost guaranteed
> to have bugs in his code that relate to the very issue that the PEP
> addresses.  How could he not, since he's obviously never thought about
> it before?  Someone who thinks this way should be thanking his lucky
> stars ...

Suppose a programmer who has used "/", knowing perfectly well what it does,
has written a heap of code.

Suppose he's just left the job, and you've taken his place. Since he has
(not unreasonably) not documented his use of the arithmetic operators,
because for some strange reason he didn't expect them to change, then "How
on Earth am I going to know what needs changing?" is exactly what you're
going to think.

Would you be thanking your lucky stars?

PJDM
--
Peter Mayne
IBM GSA (but the opinions are mine)
Canberra, ACT, Australia
This post is covered by Sturgeon's Law.