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Comment by gpderetta | Hacker News Reader

I have been extremely critical of the P2 to P3 drama, but to be totally fair, things haven't been as smooth as we like to remember in C++ land. While the c++11 standard (and successors) are highly compatible with c++98, most compilers at the turn of the millennium had questionable conformance and each compiler upgrade to a more recent and strict version was a lot of pain (I still remember the pain when GCC started enforcing two phase lookup).

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I agree things could be better in c++, but never was never anything like python 3, redefining / , or removing printf. Also, usually once you fixed your code, it still worked in older compilers (although not always).

Yes also often the compiler would tell you exactly what to do (90% of the time it was a missing typename).

While I generally agree with your comment, Python generally gives easily accessible migration paths. Regarding your division example, you could import from __future__ integer_division (maybe it was another name?) Since I think Python 2.5 before it became the default in, I think, 2.7.

I wish the wallrus operator was available as a future import, bit it's not.

Also, Python never had printf. It had a print statement; print became a function in Python 3. Yes, its a syntax change, but its for the better. Having print as a first class statement expands its utility and versatility.

Removing printf was an example of a change C++ could make of similar effect (they could argue you should be using cout, so you don't need it). Sorry it was unclear

I don't understand people complaining about the removal of the print statement. Switching that to a function call is the easiest part of porting to Python 3. You don't even have to do it yourself, just run 2to3. If you're complaining about that I feel like you're just looking for something to complain about.

You are right. The print statement is easy to complain about. My main issue was all the strings/unicode changes, which were hard to track down as often code would continue to work until a non-unicode input came in, when it would error. Debugging all those issues took ages.

This is a good point, because of the dynamic nature of python, the incompatibility is not always visible at compile time (parse type?), but can happen at run time and only rarely.

You need very good test coverage.

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