gratuitous new features in 2.0

[Tim Peters]

[Grant Griffin]
> I know that it's very important not to break old code, and I know Guido
> and other language designers are very committed to that (which is
> generally A Very Good Thing.)  But it's a tradeoff: I would posit that
> people who have a problem with old code vis-a-vis "to" could either
> change it, or just stick with 1.5.2. <<toheck with 'em>>

Grant, just yesterday you were posting on behalf of the commerical world in
praise of "stability".  Nobody is amused when their old code fails to
compile under a new release, and Guido hasn't risked a new keyword since ...
26 January 1994, with release 1.0.0.  That's when he released contributed
code for the then-new "lambda", and it doesn't help matters any that he's
regretted that ever since <0.8 wink>.  The only reason he risked it then is
that he figured he could risk a *little* incompatibility in the first
release of the 1.0 line.

> Also, so many points of Tim's "Python Philosophy" point in favor of "to"
> and against ">>"* that I guess my personal instinct is that The Greater
> Pythonic Good would be served by it.

"No new keywords" has been one of the few absolute rules here.  Although
Guido often shows signs of being on the brink of breaking it <wink>.

> *BTW, what's wrong with ">" for redirect?  Heck, anything that both DOS
> and Unix do can't be _all_ bad! <wink>

To both Unix and DOS users, ">" implies overwrite and ">>" implies append.
The print semantics are much closer to the latter.  Ditto to the meaning of
">>" in C++ in an output context.  Using ">" instead would *really* be
gratuitous novelty.

for-much-the-same-reason-python-uses-"+"-to-mean-addition<wink>-ly y'rs
    - tim