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Thu Jan 29 22:54:28 CET 2009 · http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2009-January/085665.html

Raymond Hettinger wrote:
> From: "Guido van Rossum" <guido at python.org>
>> On the one hand I understand that those folks want a stable target. On
>> the other hand I think they would prefer to find out sooner rather
>> than later they're using stuff they shouldn't be using any more. It's
>> a delicate balance for sure, and I certainly don't want to open the
>> floodgates here, or rebrand 3.1 as 3.0.1 or anything like that. But I
>> really don't believe that the strictest interpretation of "no new
>> features" will benefit us for 3.0.1. Perhaps we should decide when to
>> go back to a more strict interpretation of the rules based on the
>> uptake of Python 3 compared to Python 2.
>
> That seems like a smart choice to me.  Make the fixups as early as 
> possible,
> before there has been significant uptake.
>
> Am reminded of a cautionary tale from The Art of Unix Programming 
> http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch15s04.html#id2986550 :
>
> """
>
> No discussion of make(1) would be complete without an acknowledgement 
> that it includes one of the worst design botches in the history of 
> Unix. The use of tab characters as a required leader for command lines 
> associated with a production means that the interpretation of a 
> makefile can change drastically on the basis of invisible differences 
> in whitespace.
>
>
> "Why the tab in column 1? Yacc was new, Lex was brand new. I hadn't 
> tried either, so I figured this would be a good excuse to learn. After 
> getting myself snarled up with my first stab at Lex, I just did 
> something simple with the pattern newline-tab. It worked, it stayed. 
> And then a few weeks later I had a user population of about a dozen, 
> most of them friends, and I didn't want to screw up my embedded base. 
> The rest, sadly, is history." -- Stuart Feldman
>
> """
>

I suspect that the use of significant whitespace is too deeply ingrained 
in Python for us to change it now - even in Python 3. ;-)

Michael

>
> Raymond
>
>
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[Python-Dev] Python 3.0.1