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by jamesgeck0 4402 days ago
Syntax changes can be an issue for backwards compatibility, but that's not what I was talking about.

It's easy to specify what the minimum version of Python you want to support is. Even if there's syntax which is incompatible with Python 2 in the file, a hashbang that specifies `python3` is pretty clear.

1 comments

Yes, #!/usr/bin/python3 is clear, but I don't think it addresses the question you were responding to, which was whether the scripts the OP of this subthread was talking about, which he knows will run under Python 2 (because he downloaded them and ran them under Python 2--he mentioned this in another subthread), will know to check for the presence of Python 3 and use it. Any such script will have to check sys.version_info to know which version of Python it is running under (and for at least one version the shebang will be irrelevant anyway since it can only specify python or python3, not both), and it will have to be syntax-compatible with both versions. If the script isn't syntax-compatible with Python 3, then he'll have to go find and download a version that is, if it exists.