"python -3" not working as expected

[Benjamin]

On Jan 8, 11:35 pm, John Machin <sjmac... at lexicon.net> wrote:
> On Jan 9, 1:56 pm, Benjamin <musiccomposit... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On Jan 8, 4:21 pm, Thorsten Kampe <thors... at thorstenkampe.de> wrote:
>
> > > * Terry Reedy (Thu, 08 Jan 2009 17:04:04 -0500)
> > > > Since you are, I believe, at least the second person to report being bit
> > > > by this confusion, please open an issue at bugs.python.org and suggest a
> > > > couple of revised sentences that you think are more informative.
>
> > > Will do tomorrow. The revised sentence could be in the line of "warn
> > > about Python 3.x incompatibilities that cannot trivially be fixed by
> > > 2to3.py".
>
> > Actually, don't bother now; I've fixed it up in the trunk.
>
> Would you mind giving a pointer to where or what your fix is? The
> reason for asking is that Thorsten's suggestion is ambiguous: warn
> about some? all? 3.x problems that can't be trivially fixed by 2to3?
> Can't be "all"; there are in fact a number of problems that can't be
> trivially fixed by 2to3 and can't be detected by running 2.6 with the
> -3 option.

I added "and cannot by trivially fixed by 2to3".

>
> These include
> (a) problems that cause a reasonably informative exception in 3.x
> right at the point where the problem exists
> (b) problems where the behaviour has changed but no exception is
> raised, and your code lurches off down the wrong path, and you need to
> work backwards from subsequent exception(s) and/or failing test case
> (s) to pin-point the problem.
>
> I'll use string constants to provide an example of each type. When
> faced with "abcd", 2to3 has no way of telling whether that should be
> str ("abcd") or bytes (b"abcd"). In the vast majority of cases, to
> guess it should be str is correct, so there is no change to the source
> file, and a warning would  almostly always be noise.
>
> Example of problem (a): chunks is a list of slices of bytes read from
> a binary file.
> In 2.x you write
> glued = ''.join(chunks)
> In 3.0 you get this:>>> chunks = [b'x', b'y']
> >>> ''.join(chunks)
>
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
> TypeError: sequence item 0: expected str instance, bytes found
>
> Example of problem (b): some_bytes has been read from a file that was
> opened in 'rb' mode and contains the 4 ASCII bytes 'abcd'
> # 2.x simulation>> some_bytes == "abcd"
>
> True
> # 3.0 simulation>>> type(some_bytes)
> <class 'bytes'>
> >>> type("abcd")
> <class 'str'>
> >>> some_bytes == "abcd"
>
> False # because the types are not comparable for equality.
>
> Another type (b) example is the (majority-guessed) 2to3 change from [c]
> StringIO.StringIO to io.StringIO ... if you really should feed some
> library an io.BytesIO instance instead, it can travel quite a distance
> before blowing up.

Yes, bytes/str is an excellent example of where the third part of the
porting helpers. We'll need good documentation. Unfortunately, as you
note below, this isn't exactly the case yet.

>
> Perhaps some of this info could be put intohttp://docs.python.org/dev/py3k/whatsnew/3.0.html#porting-to-python-3-0
> ... or maybe a separate HOWTO or wiki chapter could be set up for
> porting to 3.x, including topics like:
> (1) maintaining one set of source files (when you are maintaining a
> package that must run on e.g. 2.1 through 3.x)
> (2) the possibility of a 3to2 kit for those who have the 2.1 to 3.x
> support-range issue but would like to have the one set of source
> looking like 3.x code instead of the ugliness of version-conditional
> stuff like
> BYTES_NULL = bytes(0) # 3.x
> or
> BYTES_NULL = '' # 2.x
> and (3) [getting in early] what about a %to{} kit (or a {}to% kit!)?
>
> Cheers,
> John