On Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:25:46 -0500, Benjamin Kaplan wrote: > When Python 2.6 came out, Jython was still on 2.2. The difference > between 2.2 and 2.6 is almost as big of a difference as between 2.6 and > 3.0. In that time, you had the introduction of the boolean type, > generators, list comprehensions, the addition of the "yield" and "with" > keywords, universal newline support, and decorators in addition to the > large number of changes to the standard library such as the introduction > of the subprocess module.
THANK YOU Benjamin for injecting this note of sanity into the discussion. I believe that, with the possible exception of the change from byte strings to unicode strings, virtually *all* the hoo-har over Python 3 is simply due to the tactical mistake of Guido and the Python Dev team of *calling* Python 3 a backward incompatible release. Python has had previous major changes in the past (e.g. 1.5 to 2.0 and 2.1 to 2.2) and hardly anyone made a complaint. Certainly the move from 2.x to 3.x is a big move. If you have to support both series simultaneously, I don't envy your job, but if CherryPy can do it, so can others. But it's not qualitatively different from supporting (say) 2.4 through 2.6. Targeting multiple versions is always a PITA. I also find it telling that perhaps the biggest change of all, the one from byte strings to unicode, hardly rates a mention from the skeptics and haters. Instead we get rants about how division behaves differently (forgetting that "from __future__ import division" has worked since at least 2.4 and possibly older) and complaints that print is different. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
