On Sat, Apr 19, 2014 at 11:26 PM, Roy Smith <r...@panix.com> wrote: > Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> I strongly recommend going for Python 3 unless something actually >> stops you from doing so. > > One of the problems is you don't know in advance if something is going > to stop you. By committing to P3 now, you are eliminating from possible > future use, all of those third-party modules which only support P2. And > you don't know which of those you'll need until you sometime in the > future.
Conversely, committing to Py2 now eliminates from possible future use all modules which support only Py3. Is there strong evidence that one of those groups is larger than the other? >> If you absolutely must use Python 2, try to >> aim for a minimum of 2.6 or 2.7 > > That I absolutely agree with. Unless I had some specific legacy use > case I needed to continue to support, I wouldn't waste any time worrying > about 2.5 support, and we're quickly reaching the point where the same > can be said about 2.6. Red Hat? :) Though that's likely to be the last bastion of ancient Python out there, soon. Debian Squeeze (oldstable) ships with 2.6, so if you aim for 2.6+, you should catch all the distros that derive from Debian (the current Debian stable, Wheezy, ships with 2.7). But Red Hat will be supporting older Pythons for a good while. >> and start your program with this line: >> >> from __future__ import print_function, unicode_literals, division > > That seems reasonable, but be prepared for possible unicode issues. > There is code out there in third party modules which makes > unicode-unfriendly assumptions about strings. Right. It's not the magic line that fixes everything; if it were, Python 3 wouldn't be a big deal at all. Go Py3 if you can, but if you can't, at least make your double-quoted strings Unicode strings, and then you have a chance to find problems. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
