[Python-ideas] Smoothing transition to Python 3

[Guido van Rossum]

The bytes -> int behavior is widely considered a mistake. We're just
not able to fix it without yet another round of layoffs ^W
deprecations. And I'm not ready for that -- not even Python 4 should
be allowed to change this unilaterally. Though maybe we could do
something with a __future__ import.

On Sat, Jun 4, 2016 at 4:29 PM,  <tritium-list at sdamon.com> wrote:
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Python-ideas [mailto:python-ideas-bounces+tritium-
>> list=sdamon.com at python.org] On Behalf Of Neil Schemenauer
>> Sent: Saturday, June 4, 2016 4:27 AM
>> To: python-ideas at python.org
>> Subject: Re: [Python-ideas] Smoothing transition to Python 3
>>
>> On 2016-06-04, tritium-list at sdamon.com wrote:
>> > In fact most of the things you list here are the GOOD ideas
>> > that python 3 enforces that reduces bugs when avoided in python 2.
>>
>> Sure, and I'm not proposing that standard Python 3.x change the
>> behavior.
>>
>> > What would actually help the transition, in my world-view at least is
>> >
>> > * A bytes type like the string type in python 2 (*without implicit
>> > conversion!*) There are too many real world use cases that the bytes
> type
>> > makes painful, including anything dealing with networking.
>>
>> The Python 3 bytes type should gain whatever features it needs to
>> make things not painful.  The %-based formating in 3.5 is a big one.
>> Is there something else you miss?
>>
>
> b'Foo'[0] returning b'F' instead of the int 70
>
>> > * an alias to the string type named 'unicode' (this just makes polyglot
> a
>> > whole heck of a lot less stressful... yes I do this myself, it's
> annoying,
>> > if it was there by default, like bytes is in 2.7, it would make life a
> lot
>> > easier.  One just never just never references `str`)
>>
>> Maybe too late now but there should have been 'unicode',
>> 'basestring' as aliases for 'str'.
>>
>> > * a "magic" mapping from old to new module names.  In my experience,
>> this is
>> > actually a bigger pain than it looks.
>>
>> I would like to add this to my "pragmatic" version.
>>
>> > The general response was the theme of the entire python 3
>> > transition story:  "I don't see the value added."
>>
>> Yes, and here we are.  Python 3 is not yet winning and I'm not sure
>> it will.  I believe Dropbox, Facebook and Google are all still using
>> Python 2.  If porting code was so easy, why are they not moved over?
>> I see VMWare released some new IoT SDK:
>>
>>     https://github.com/vmware/liota
>>
>> This is new code, written this year.  It is not compatible with
>> Python 3 as far as I see.  I can't understand why people don't see
>> we have a problem.
>>
>>   Neil
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-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)