Re: [pygame] Python 3.0 to be backwards incompatible ?

[Toni Alatalo <antont@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Paulo Silva kirjoitti:
> http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/01/1624247
> well, this sounds to me as a huge headache... but i'd like to know
> oppinions about (what will be improved, what will be changed),
>   

slashdot is now, what, 3 or 5 years behind in the news reporting?-o

the whole idea of the Python 3000 project was to fix the legacy things 
that the dictator and the community wanted to fix, by breaking backwards 
compatibility. python has always been very careful about backwards 
compatibility and done a good job there, but time also became ripe for 
changing some old basic things (like the print statement).

furthermore the idea is that no one is forced to use python 3.0. at 
least not in a quite long time (think 5 years?). good things from the 
development there have been already backported to 2.6 and i guess that 
will continue in the 2.* series. but people who like the changes can 
start migrating to the new land. also there are conversion tools etc. to 
help with that. but i see no reason to hurry right now.

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3000/ is the authorative document. 
seems that i recalled the time quite wrong, was it really as recently as 
april 2006 when 3000 started? seems it was ages ago..

> specially all Pygame coders, and how far it may affect Pygame games
> supposed to be 'considered' done...
>   

i haven't thought of it specifically regarding pygame yet. i guess the 
games domain does not differ much from other software w.r.t the changes 
in 3.

one thing that does touch pygame centrally is the new buffer protocol 
(for thing like numpy), which iirc was developed first for 3 but is now 
also in 2.6. that was already discussed here a while ago (last winter or 
so), i don't remember what the resolution was so far though.

btw there is one thing i certainly like in 3 and that is the division 
operator being 'true division' by default. i always do "from __future__ 
import division" in python2, as otherwise easily get stupid bugs in game 
code. http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0238/ Changing the Division 
Operator

to be forwards compatible in python2 it is a good idea to use // when 
you really want int division.

i don't know what pygame's strategy should be, when it'd be good to 
start migrating - perhaps sooner than later (within a year and not 3?)

~Toni