from future import pass_function

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Thu, 26 Jul 2012 13:45:23 +0200, Ulrich Eckhardt wrote:

> I didn't say "Pass should be a function!" but asked "What do you
> think?". You are assuming lots of things about my goals and jumping to
> conclusions like that I'm complaining about the stupid Python syntax,
> that I'm a frustrated noob, that I want someone to fix that syntax, but
> that is not the case! I'm engaging in a discussion here exactly in order
> to test the idea I had.

Fair point. I underestimated you. But go back and re-read your first 
post, and see if you can understand *why* I underestimated you. You 
really didn't give any sign that you had given this question much 
detailed thought.

Perhaps if you had mentioned that you had not decided whether this was a 
good idea and was looking for arguments both for and against, this tone 
of this discussion would have been very different.



>> It took me a long time to learn that, for an established language like
>> Python, change is nearly always for the worse, and any change that
>> requires changing existing code better have a very good excuse.
> 
> ...so what do you do when you have an idea? You think about it on your
> own, right? I do so, too, but I also engage in discussions with others.
> See? BTW: I think you missed the implications of this thread's topic and
> the snide remark about forcing people to change their code, i.e. that no
> existing code has to change (apart from the Python implementation, of
> course), even if pass was made a function!

I think that you misunderstand the purpose of from __future__ import. It 
is a *temporary* measure, always. Features which are not backward 
compatible are FIRST introduced as __future__ features, and THEN a 
release or two later, they become mandatory. (Unless they are dropped, 
which has not happened yet.)

There have been seven __future__ features as of Python 3.2:

absolute_import (enabled in 2.5, mandatory in 2.7)
division (enabled in 2.2, mandatory in 3.0)
generators (enabled in 2.2, mandatory in 2.3)
nested_scopes (enabled in 2.1, mandatory in 2.2)
print_function (enabled in 2.6, mandatory in 3.0)
unicode_literals (enabled in 2.6, mandatory in 3.0)
with_statement (enabled in 2.5, mandatory in 2.6)


In any case, I acknowledge that I was wrong about your motivation. I made 
a guess based on the limited information I had, and based on my own 
history, and you tell me my guess was wrong. I accept that.



-- 
Steven