[ZPT] TALES Feature Survey

[Guido van Rossum]

> I plan to give everyone the weekend to respond to the survey, then those
> features without -1s or significant ???s will go into a Monday release.

I've seen at least one -1 for the elimination of path modifiers. Can I
counter that with a +100?  Path modifiers really have to go.  I expect
that the -1 is simly motivated by backwards compatibility concern --
the voter probably has a bunch of templates using path modifiers that
they don't want to have to fix.  While I appreciate the concern, I
don't think that this should be a sufficient reason to keep them in.
TALES is in an early enough stage that backwards compatibility issues
really shouldn't guide our design decisions -- at least not if we hope
it to be successful.

There's a story about how some of the bad design decisions in Make
(like the requirement for hard tabs) came about -- its designer was
aware of the problem, but reluctant to change it, because there were
already "dozens of users" within his organization.  Let's not repeat
this mistake.  Path modifiers don't belong in TALES, and we have a
good alternative.  So let's take them out.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)