[Python-Dev] PEP 3003 - Python Language Moratorium
Nick Coghlan
ncoghlan at gmail.com
Sat Nov 7 03:42:35 CET 2009
Georg Brandl wrote:
> Guido van Rossum schrieb:
>
>> Actually, I think Dirkjan has a point. I'm not sure that we need
>> another moratorium (that's a rather dramatic kind of decision which
>> should be very rare indeed) but I do agree that deprecations are often
>> more of a pain than they're worth.
>>
>> For example, take the deprecation of the md5 and sha modules in Python
>> 2.6. They make it a bit of a pain to write code that *cleanly*
>> supports Python 2.4 (doesn't have hashlib) through 2.6 (warns when
>> importing md5 instead of hashlib). You can silence the warning, but
>> that is in itself not particularly clean, and users really hate having
>> the warnings.
>
> Trying to import hashlib and importing md5 on ImportError isn't *too* unclean,
> is it?
Having had to do this myself a few times, I was always a little
surprised the "import-or" idea [1] didn't get more support the last time
it was proposed.
Ah well, don't need to worry about that idea again until 3.4 or so :)
Cheers,
Nick
P.S. For anyone unfamiliar with it, "import-or" was a suggestion made
around the time xml.etree was added to the standard library to provide a
"import x or y as z" shorthand for:
try:
import x as z
except ImportError:
import y as z
(allowing "from a or b import c" was also part of the suggestion, as was
allowing multiple "or" elements in a single import request)
Support for the idea was lukewarm at best, hostile at worst (hence the
lack of PEP).
Cheers,
Nick.
--
Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan at gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia
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