> shame > 1 a. a painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt, > shortcoming, or impropriety > 2 a condition of humiliating disgrace or disrepute
Sigh. This is stupid (in the usual usage), but I must reply because I can't control myself. I meant usage 5: "something regrettable, unfortunate, or outrageous: it's a shame that he wasn't told." -- http://www.yourdictionary.com/shame I think outrageous is appropriate here because I think it's outrageous to change the basic usage for things like dictionary.keys() when it would be so easy to leave the old definition and add a new method like dictionary.keySet(). This would save me personally a great deal of painful tedium, I suspect (especially considering that I've implemented a lot of "dictionary-like" objects -- so I'll have to change the way their "keys" method works -- or something -- I haven't figured it out yet...). I know that the designers of Python are motivated by a desire to attain a Platonic ideal of aesthetic perfection primarily with a weaker desire to make lives easy for people writing libraries and tools somewhere further down the list, but from my perspective it's a shame^H^H^H^H^H regretable and unfortunate that the aesthetics so often trumps other considerations. In C# and java, for example, this sort of issue has never been a problem in my experience: stuff I wrote many versions ago still works just fine with no changes (but please note that I don't write gui stuff, which is less stable -- I'm speaking of algorithmic and system libraries). -- Aaron Watters === btw: usage (5) for "shame" in the python source: http://www.xfeedme.com/nucular/pydistro.py/go?FocusId=463&FREETEXT=shame -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
