On Aug 26, 2011, at 05:25 PM, Dan Stromberg wrote: >from __future__ import is an established way of trying something for a while >to see if it's going to work.
Actually, no. The documentation says: -----snip snip----- __future__ is a real module, and serves three purposes: * To avoid confusing existing tools that analyze import statements and expect to find the modules they’re importing. * To ensure that future statements run under releases prior to 2.1 at least yield runtime exceptions (the import of __future__ will fail, because there was no module of that name prior to 2.1). * To document when incompatible changes were introduced, and when they will be — or were — made mandatory. This is a form of executable documentation, and can be inspected programmatically via importing __future__ and examining its contents. -----snip snip----- So, really the __future__ module is a way to introduce accepted but incompatible changes in a controlled way, through successive releases. It's never been used to introduce experimental features that might be removed if they don't work out. Cheers, -Barry _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
