Home Original page

[python-committers] Python 4.0 or Python 3.10?

Serhiy Storchaka storchaka at gmail.com
Tue Sep 25 16:38:36 EDT 2018 
25.09.18 22:40, Barry Warsaw пише:
> On Sep 25, 2018, at 15:31, Antoine Pitrou <antoine at python.org> wrote:
>> So my preference would be on 3.10.
> 3.9 + 0.1 :)
>
> Renaming it to Python 4 is fraught with knock-on effects, so I think we do reserve that for major changes.  I doubt we’ll ever need for a disruptive backward incompatible change *at the Python level* in a Python 4, but I absolutely can see the possibility of incompatible changes at the public C API layer.  I’m not saying it *will* happen, but that’s what we should reserve “Python 4” for if or when it happens.

I concur.

And changing the major version number itself is significant breaking 
change. From the name of the executable (python3 vs python4) hardcoded 
in Python and shell scripts to a number of third-party scripts that 
contain in the best case:

     PY3 = sys.version_info[0] == 3
     if not PY3:
         ... # implies Python 2

and in the worst case:

     PY3 = sys.version[0] == '3'

Changing the minor version number from a single-digit to a two-digits 
will break some software too, but I think that this breakage is smaller.
More information about the python-committers mailing list