Pep 3105: the end of print?

[Beliavsky]

On Feb 16, 10:17 am, Steven D'Aprano
<s... at REMOVE.THIS.cybersource.com.au> wrote:
> On Fri, 16 Feb 2007 09:49:03 -0500, Jean-Paul Calderone wrote:
> > On Sat, 17 Feb 2007 01:32:21 +1100, Steven D'Aprano
> >> [snip]
>
> >>I don't think that follows at all. print is only a problem if you expect
> >>your code to work under both Python 2.x and 3.x. I wouldn't imagine
> >>that many people are going to expect that: I know I don't.
>
> > I think some people are confused that the language "Python 3.x" has "Python"
> > in its name, since there is already a language with "Python" in its name,
> > with which it is not compatible.
>
> There is no language "Python 3" -- yet. We're still all guessing just
> how compatible it will be with Python 2.
>
> To be precise, there is an experimental Python 3, but the specifications
> of the language are not fixed yet.
>
> As for the name... big deal. C and C++ and Objective C are completely
> different languages.Fortran 77 and Fortran 90 aren't exactly the same;
> nobody expects the same code to run unmodified on Forth 77 and FigForth,
> or any of another three dozen varieties of Forth.

The attitudes towards backwards compatibility of the Fortran standards
committee and the Python BDFL is very different.

Fortran 90 was a superset of Fortran 77, so standard-conforming
Fortran 77 programs have the same meaning when compiled with an F90
compiler. The committee does not consider changing things like the
meaning of 1/2. Even though WRITE provides a superset of the
functionality of PRINT, the committee would not dream of breaking so
much code by removing PRINT. No feature is deleted without being
declared obsolescent in a previous standard, which makes it easier to
plan ahead. In practice Fortran 95 compilers accept deleted features,
but they are required to a have a switch that identifies non-standard
code.

I think the C and C++ committees also take backwards compatibility
seriously, in part because they know
that working programmers will ignore them if they break too much old
code.