py3k concerns. An example

[Aaron Watters]

> shame
> 1 a. a painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt,
>      shortcoming, or impropriety
> 2 a condition of humiliating disgrace or disrepute

Sigh.  This is stupid (in the usual usage), but
I must reply because I can't control myself.  I meant
usage 5:

"something regrettable, unfortunate, or outrageous:
it's a shame that he wasn't told."
   -- http://www.yourdictionary.com/shame

I think outrageous is appropriate here because
I think it's outrageous to change the basic
usage for things like dictionary.keys() when
it would be so easy to leave the old definition
and add a new method like dictionary.keySet().
This would save me personally a great deal of
painful tedium, I suspect (especially considering
that I've implemented a lot of "dictionary-like"
objects -- so I'll have to change the way their
"keys" method works -- or something -- I haven't
figured it out yet...).

I know that the designers of Python are motivated
by a desire to attain a Platonic ideal of
aesthetic perfection primarily with a weaker desire
to make lives easy for people writing libraries
and tools somewhere further down the list,
but from my perspective it's a shame^H^H^H^H^H
regretable and unfortunate that the aesthetics
so often trumps other considerations.

In C# and java, for example, this sort of issue
has never been a problem
in my experience: stuff I wrote many versions ago
still works just fine with no changes (but please
note that I don't write gui stuff, which is less
stable -- I'm speaking of algorithmic and system
libraries).
  -- Aaron Watters

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btw: usage (5) for "shame" in the python source:
http://www.xfeedme.com/nucular/pydistro.py/go?FocusId=463&FREETEXT=shame