[Python-Dev] Re: Stability and change

[Guido van Rossum]

> > (2) Was the pain worth it, or would you prefer we'd spent more time on
> >     being more backwards compatible?
> 
> fwiw, I think it would be a really good idea to decouple (large
> portions of) the standard library from the interpreter core, and
> keep the same code base running on multiple versions.
> 
> if not else, it would force the core developers to "share the
> pain" ;-)

I thought Gordon was saying that most of the pain was to fix code that
*accidentally* worked in 1.5.2 but broke in 2.0.  Whether or not you
fix that in a backwards-compatible way, we've all shared that pain
already.

Other than sharing the pain, I don't see much of an advantage.

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