Booleans, integer division, backwards compatibility; where is Python going?

[Terry Reedy]

"Tim Churches" <tchur at optushome.com.au> wrote in message
news:mailman.1018074974.20211.python-list at python.org...

> I sometimes use a statistics package called Stata. It has been
around  for
> well over a decade, with major upgrades to the core language
released
> about every two years or so - hence there are three or four versions
in common
> use.

Stata charges several hundred dollars for its statistics package.
Hence, it can pay a bunch of programmers to work behind closed doors.
I suspect that there are several internal releases during the
development and test period.  Of course, this may mean that outsiders
have to wait for as much as two years to get a new feature after it is
finalized.

Would you prefer that Python developers went behind closed doors?
Should they have kept 2.1, 2.2 private?  Should they keep 2.3, etc
private until ready to release 3.0 maybe two years from now?  And not
get the benefit of free user feedback?  -- which commercial companies
pay for when they want to keep it secret.

> In order to allow users who are still running Stata V4
> to write routines which will behave correctly in Stata V7 (and vice
versa),
> Stata has a "version" statement. If I am running Version 7, I can
put something like
> "USE VERSION 4" (I don't recall the exact syntax) at the top of my
programs
> and the program will be executed as if it were running in Stata V4.

Stata users PAY to get this sort of maintenance of the past.  Perhaps
there is a business opportunity for a Python entrepreneur.  Perhaps
not.

Terry J. Reedy