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deprecation gotchas Re: rotor alternative?

Aaron Watters aaron at reportlab.com
Wed Nov 19 13:26:01 EST 2003 
hwlgw at hotmail.com (Will Stuyvesant) wrote in message news:<cb035744.0311181342.318796ba at posting.google.com>...
> Deprecation is a very serious matter.  I love the Python language but
> I have questions about the deprecation decisions. 

Yea, random changes can do a lot of damage.  Examples
   repr(string) went hex and broke a lot of stuff for interacting
     with systems that matched the old octal representation 
     (pdf format for example).  It's very hard to ferret out all
     the places where someone assumed that chr(0)=="\000".
   cgi.environ disappeared and broke every cgi script in the CD
     ROM in my python book right after it hit the shelves. :(!
   regex was used pervasively.  Why not just provide a translator stub
     rather than deprecate it (noting in the documentation that it's
     slower)?  More examples on request...
arrgh.  Please don't break code for cosmetic reasons!
    -- Aaron Watters
===
I can't do that, Dave.
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