Should __future__ statements ever be phased out?

[Moshe Zadka]

On Tue, 20 Mar 2001, <hamish_lawson at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> The __future__ proposal envisages that future statements in a piece of
> code will be phased out once the language change becomes standard.
> (Many of the alternative proposals also envisage this.) Does this not
> pose possible problems with running post-change-aware code on an
> pre-change version of the interpreter?

Yes. That is what is meant when saying "it breaks backwards compatability".
Just like your hypothetical friend can't compile Python, because his
C compile only supports K&R C, not ANSI C.

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