On Feb 16, 10:17 am, Steven D'Aprano <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Fri, 16 Feb 2007 09:49:03 -0500, Jean-Paul Calderone wrote: > > On Sat, 17 Feb 2007 01:32:21 +1100, Steven D'Aprano > >> [snip] > > >>I don't think that follows at all. print is only a problem if you expect > >>your code to work under both Python 2.x and 3.x. I wouldn't imagine > >>that many people are going to expect that: I know I don't. > > > I think some people are confused that the language "Python 3.x" has "Python" > > in its name, since there is already a language with "Python" in its name, > > with which it is not compatible. > > There is no language "Python 3" -- yet. We're still all guessing just > how compatible it will be with Python 2. > > To be precise, there is an experimental Python 3, but the specifications > of the language are not fixed yet. > > As for the name... big deal. C and C++ and Objective C are completely > different languages.Fortran 77 and Fortran 90 aren't exactly the same; > nobody expects the same code to run unmodified on Forth 77 and FigForth, > or any of another three dozen varieties of Forth.
The attitudes towards backwards compatibility of the Fortran standards committee and the Python BDFL is very different. Fortran 90 was a superset of Fortran 77, so standard-conforming Fortran 77 programs have the same meaning when compiled with an F90 compiler. The committee does not consider changing things like the meaning of 1/2. Even though WRITE provides a superset of the functionality of PRINT, the committee would not dream of breaking so much code by removing PRINT. No feature is deleted without being declared obsolescent in a previous standard, which makes it easier to plan ahead. In practice Fortran 95 compilers accept deleted features, but they are required to a have a switch that identifies non-standard code. I think the C and C++ committees also take backwards compatibility seriously, in part because they know that working programmers will ignore them if they break too much old code. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
