the Gravity of Python 2

[Devin Jeanpierre]

On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 6:28 PM, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
> class Foo(str):
>     def __add__(self, other):
>         if isinstance(other, unicode): return self + other.encode("cp500")
>         return str.__add__(self, other)
>
> What happens if you have the __future__ directive disabling
> autoencoding on (a) the module in which this class is defined, (b) the
> one in which the it was instantiated, (c) the one that actually uses
> the +?

In both methods I described, all uses of instances of the class are
changed, but only in case A. That's a really good point, I hadn't
considered that the second case could be converted into the first.

> This is why I think it's getting magical.

Yes, it's magical, but to be fair that's stack inspection as it always is.

I am OK with a little ugliness if it makes actual work easier.

> Far better to do this sort
> of change on a per-application basis - maybe with a warning parameter
> that you can enable when running your test suite, as has been
> suggested (and in many cases implemented) for other 2-vs-3 problems.

Doing a flag like that that enables a backwards incompatible change
does in fact address that issue you were worried about originally, so
that's something. And feature-by-feature moves are, like the OP said,
still lower cost than a wholesale move.

In the end a gradual transition can still be done with the polyglot
approach, but I'm not happy that there's no way to enforce/test a
polyglot conversion until it is complete. Any kind of granularity
would have helped. :(

-- Devin