Steven D'Aprano <st...@remove-this-cybersource.com.au> writes: > If you were designing your own language from scratch, so that backwards > compatibility wasn't an issue, why would you make print a statement?
As another real estate analogy, my apartment has some problems with its plumbing, plus an ugly spot on the kitchen wall that could use a coat of paint to fix. The plumbing problem is fairly serious (they keep shutting off the water in the building when it acts up) but the kitchen spot is a minor annoyance that is mostly hidden by the refrigerator anyway. Fixing either of those things would be a hassle: I'd have to cover all my stuff with plastic and stay out of the apartment for a day or so while the maintenance guys hacked on things, and I'd expect some of my stuff to get damaged inadvertently no matter how careful everyone was. It's worth dealing with the repair hassles to get the plumbing fixed, and if I'm going to have to deal with that disruption anyway, then sure, I'd like them to paint the kitchen spot at the same time. But if they say they want me to cover up all my stuff and leave so they can JUST fix the kitchen spot, and then do the same thing a second time so they can fix the plumbing at some unspecified date in the future, then I'd rather just live with the kitchen spot the way it is. Yes it's a cosmetic blemish, but it's not causing any real problems, and I'd rather not deal with the hassle and risk of fixing it if there's no other benefit. In Python terms, the print statement is the spot on the wall, while the plumbing is something like the GIL and the legacy codebase that would break in a hundred ways if Python had real parallelism and a tracing garbage collector and a native-code compiler and the various language changes it would take to make all that stuff really fly rather than just limp along. If they are going to make everyone deal with the disruption of migrating to an incompatible version, they should do it once rather than twice. In short, there's a mythical Python 4 that only exists in my imagination, but it already interests me a lot more than Python 3. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
