Comment on PEP-0238

[Guido van Rossum]

"Robert J. Harrison" <rjh at 3-cities.com> writes:

> From recent discussion it is not clear to me if
> PeP 0238 (http://python.sourceforge.net/peps/pep-0238.html)
> has gained favor, or not.
> 
> Two comments.  First, its major emphasis is on benefitting
> inexperienced programmers, but, by being inconsistent with
> other mainstream languages, it is not clear to me that it
> is actually a benefit for them.

Perl is not mainstream? ;-)

> It is certainly not a benefit for experiencd programmers that
> routinely switch between Python and other languages.

Your argument ends up pleading to repeat the mistakes of other
languages -- in fact, taken to the extreme it would mean there should
be only on language.  I don't find it a very strong argument.

> Second, even if the change of behavior for divide (/) is accepted, I
> see no point in introducing the // operator.  A plethora of
> infrequently used operators will make Python more Perl-like.  Better
> an explicit 'cast' to integer.

I agree here.

But, unless more people speak out in favor of this PEP, it's not going
to happen in Python 2.2 -- there's too much other stuff on the table
already.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)