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by gjsman-1000
1324 days ago
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There are breaking changes - but they tend to be very granular, and typically occur after a few rounds of deprecation. Renaming a bunch of core functions, and doing something radical (like, deleting the `$` prefix requirement) would break every single line of code, in every function, and in every library. It would be Python 3 all over again. Whereas... imagine if Python 3 rolled out simply as an optional "mode of operation" on top of Python 2. If you opt-in on this particular file, the syntax requirements are different. Obviously that would prevent some deeper changes, but it would help modernize the language without as much of a radical break. |
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It's easy to imagine: Python 3 would not have existed. At all.
Python 3 changed fundamental language semantics in ways which went way beyond syntax, that's why the core team shoveled so many changes in: they were breaking the language in a way which didn't brook mere syntactic opt-ins, this meant additional changes were minor issues easily handled compared to the fundamental difficulty of overhauling the language's entire string model and significant parts of the object model.
> If you opt-in on this particular file, the syntax requirements are different.
You're about 20 years late to the party, welcome to Python 2.1: https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/2.1.html#pep-236-future-d...