PEP0238 lament

[Duncan Grisby]

In article <cp66clexxt.fsf at cj20424-a.reston1.va.home.com>,
 Guido van Rossum  <guido at python.org> wrote:

>The reason for wanting / to return a float (or at least a type that
>can represent close approximations of numbers like 0.75) has been
>discussed many times before.  The summary of the argument in the PEP
>may not be complete, but I disagree with Arthur's assessment that
>integer division is not a problem -- the VPython folks have ample
>experience that it is.

Many people have mentioned the backwards compatibility issue. For me,
the main issue is related to that, but much more devastating. I
maintain libraries which have to work on a range of Python versions.
At the moment, I can have a single set of source files which work on
all versions. The various recent language changes don't affect that.

With this division change, I will either have to maintain two parallel
versions of the source, or make use of ugly and inefficient code which
works with both old and new versions of Python.

The reality is that the whole world will not switch Python versions
overnight, so everyone who maintains a library will have to face this
issue.

Cheers,

Duncan.

-- 
 -- Duncan Grisby  \  Research Engineer  --
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