So what's wrong with __future__? (Was Re: Why "from __future__" stinks ...)

[Martin von Loewis]

Courageous <jkraska1 at san.rr.com> writes:

> While I may be guilty of not paying attention, I just don't understand
> why it's needed at all? Those who don't want to play with new features
> should keep to an older Python revision. This is the standard way of
> doing things in the language business. This import from __future__
> thing seems not on like a glorious hack, but terribly unnecessary.
> What am I missing?

That it is often not feasible to avoid more recent versions. If you
want to give your program away, it may be that other people only have
more recent versions, and want to avoid the trouble of installing an
older one just to run a single program. Or, you are using a library
that turns out to have a bug, and there is a bug-fixed version of the
library, and that library version requires a newer Python version.

Regards,
Martin