[Fwd: TIP 323 (Do Nothing Gracefully) Epillogue]

Trying a resend.  This message didn't appear yesterday, AFAICT.

-------- Original Message --------
From: Donald G Porter <dgp@...>
Subject: TIP 323 (Do Nothing Gracefully) Epillogue

TIP 323 proposed many changes along the same theme.  Most of those
changes were compatible in our usual sense.  Those have been committed
to HEAD.

A few proposed changes to [string first|last|replace] are incompatible
in the handling of empty substrings.  That was the whole point of the
proposal, to stop the jarring special treatment of empty substrings.
However, after going through the exercise of creating the patch and
testing against existing code bases, it's apparent that there are at
least some scripts and packages that rely on the very behavior that I
find jarring.  The incompatibility is not as harmless as I assumed
writing those parts of the proposal.

So, I will not commit the changes to [string], and I will delete those
parts of the proposal from TIP 323 before marking it Final.

If someone wants to bring those proposals up again as a separate TIP
where we can more carefully hash out the compatibility issues, I don't
object.

--

-- 
| Don Porter          Mathematical and Computational Sciences Division |
| donald.porter@...             Information Technology Laboratory |