[Python-Dev] Death to string functions!

[Guido van Rossum]

> Can you explain the logic behind this recent interest in removing
> string functions from the standard library?  It it performance?
> Some unicode issue?  I don't have a great attachment to string.py
> but I also don't see the justification for the amount of work it
> requires.

I figure that at *some* point we should start putting our money where
our mouth is, deprecate most uses of the string module, and start
warning about it.  Not in 2.1 probably, given my experience below.

As a realistic test of the warnings module I played with some warnings
about the string module, and then found that say most of the std
library modules use it, triggering an extraordinary amount of
warnings.  I then decided to experiment with the conversion.  I
quickly found out it's too much work to do manually, so I'll hold off
until someone comes up with a tool that does 99% of the work.

(The selection of std library modules to convert manually was
triggered by something pretty random -- I decided to silence a
particular cron job I was running. :-)

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)