[SciPy-Dev] Mea culpa: deprecation and API changes

[Ryan May]

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 7:04 PM, Warren Weckesser
<warren.weckesser at enthought.com> wrote:
> Warren Weckesser wrote:
>> Opinion wanted:  codata.find(sub) used to print a list of strings.  A
>> while ago, in response to http://projects.scipy.org/scipy/ticket/996,  I
>> changed it to return the list of strings.  But this is an API change,
>> and should follow the deprecation policy.  One way to do this is to
>> restore find() to its previous behavior, and deprecate the function.  At
>> the same time, add a new function, find_string(sub), which returns the
>> list of strings.  What do you think?
>>
>>
>
> Instead of creating a new function, I added a keyword argument whose
> default value (True) preserves the old behavior.  When it is False, it
> returns the keys instead of printing them.  In 0.9, the default behavior
> will be reversed.

Why not always return the list and just make only the print controlled
by the kwarg? That way the return type of the function doesn't depend
on a kwarg, which IIRC is considered bad style. You won't break
existing code, which will just ignore the new return value.

Ryan

-- 
Ryan May
Graduate Research Assistant
School of Meteorology
University of Oklahoma