(no subject)

[Michael Chermside]

Tim Peters writes:
> Alas, list.insert() existed before sequence indices were generalized to give
> a "count from the right end" meaning to negative index values.  When the
> generalization happened, it appears that list.insert() was just overlooked.
> 
> I'd like to change this.  If I did, how loudly would people scream?

I wouldn't mind, but I'm not your test case... the amount of Python
code I have lying around to maintain is small enough that I easily
checked to see that this wouldn't break anything.

Would the correct way to do this be to enable warnings for one release
for any code that passed a negative first argument, then make the fix
in the next release? That's annoyingly slow for those who like the
feature (but they lived without it this long, they can continue to do
so), and it's quite polite to those who live in fear of code breakage.

-- Michael Chermside