I am reminded of the horrible hacks that got encoded in various http user-agent strings so that new versions of browsers would be identified as various other older browsers so that badly written sites would send them the right version of the site for the features that they supported.
Code that will break in Python 4
51–60 of 237 posts
Re: Code that will break in Python 4
#52Maybe Python 4 will be properly compatible with Python 2?? Kidding. But more seriously, probably good advice. Isn't "explicit" one of the Pythonic mantras? But I'm wondering if any code written today really will survive until "Python 4"?
I would certainly hope code written today at least _could_ last until python 4. The idea that everything has to be rewritten just because of a language version bump is a flawed thought process IMO.
Re: Code that will break in Python 4
#53I don't get it. When Py4 comes in sight they'll fix it probably so `six.PY3` is only True when using a Python3 interpreter and I guess they'll introduce a viariable `six.PY4`.
You misread the article (six.PY3 is already like that).
Re: Code that will break in Python 4
#54Reminds me of when Linus tagged Linux 3.0 and it broke a bunch of peoples code due to their bad version checks. Linux 2.x had been going for about 15 years.
Re: Code that will break in Python 4
#55Why don't they just stop changing the syntax? They already ruined print statements. Don't engineers have better things to do?
Re: Code that will break in Python 4
#56This is a joke, right? Obviously we can't write code that will work on python 4.
Re: Code that will break in Python 4
#57Seems like this is the fault of 'six' for defining PY3 in the first place.
Re: Code that will break in Python 4
#58Version checks are also the reason why we have Windows 10 and not Windows 9 because people checked whether the OS version started with "Windows 9" (for Windows 95 and Windows 98).
Re: Code that will break in Python 4
#59No problem! I've already fixed it so that all my code is forward compatible with Python 7000, despite not knowing what any of the syntax or library changes are going to look like.
There is a difference between writing code that might break and code that is guaranteed to break. Badly written version checks are guaranteed to break.
Which is why GetVersionEx() on Windows will always tell you that you are running Windows 8, unless your application has a manifest entry indicating specifically that it is compatible with a higher version.
Microsoft thought there were too many broken version checks in the wild, so decided to hobble the version check function as a fix. I can understand why they did it.
Re: Code that will break in Python 4
#60Holy shit - people actually write code like this?
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