Another Proposal re- Integer Division

[Chris Gonnerman]

Assuming that the changes in PEP0238 are to come to pass, why
can't we issue "bugfix" releases of 1.5.2, 2.0, and 2.1 that 
add only the // operator (just as Guido is doing in the 2.2
source tree) so that those of us who don't want to upgrade 
every installation of Python (because we have very many) can
do a much smaller upgrade and then support cross-version 
integer division?

Gah.  What a run-on sentence.

Given:  // has never been a valid token before.

Given:  Portable integer division code between 2.2 and 2.4
        will be ugly, i.e.:

            floor(n/2) 

        (worse if the expression in the parentheses is 
        complicated).

Given:  Upgrading Python on a running system is a pain,
        because you have to find all the extensions you
        are currently using and rebuild or upgrade them 
        also.

On platforms like Windows with no good version management,
it would be nice to be able to install, say, 2.1.2, over
2.1.  This shouldn't require any upgrading of modules, but
would add // as an operator so that pure-Python modules 
written using // but otherwise not using 2.2+ features
would work fine.

I reuse a lot of my own modules on various customer machines.
This minor change to the older versions would ease my 
transition greatly.