I've been thinking more about how to handle deprecated functionality. See http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel/browse_thread/thread/1e7d8b8880211b80/34e374ed36977b31 for our initial discussion. There, the conclusions seemed to be:
1. We should have a DEPRECATED section of the docstring in which deprecated notes should be listed. Optionally, we could go through sections like these before a major release and remove functions, etc. 2. Throw a DeprecatedError when some piece of functionality is used. The reasoning here is that people would know very quickly what code was bad. I like #1. #2, however, seems to go too far. "Deprecated" means that things don't break just yet, they just warn you that you're on risky ground for the future and that you'd better change your code. Throwing an error aborts everything instead. Thankfully, Python already has a framework for deprecation (imagine that!). See http://docs.python.org/lib/module-warnings.html. This module creates a framework for warning the user of all sorts of things (not just deprecated functionality). The user can configure python to turn these warnings into exceptions, print them to the console, ignore them, etc. Does anyone have experience using the warning module, specifically with regards to the DeprecationWarning and PendingDeprecationWarning? Note that there are other warnings in Sage that could use the warning module, like the warning about bad points in plotting, etc. Thanks, Jason --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
