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Comment by kurtis_reed | Hacker News Reader

{:} should have been the empty dict, now there's no good solution

I agree that {:} would be a better empty expression for dicts, but that ship has already sailed. {/} looks like a good enough alternative

There is a way to make it work. Python has no problem breaking things across major versions.

Python needed a breaking change for Unicode and a breaking change for exceptions and took it ages ago for a better future today - and it's still remembered as a huge PITA by everyone. I think you'll find everyone in the Python community disagreeing with you about a not-backwards-compatible Python 4.

Every minor release of Python is a breaking change. They deprecate stuff all the time, and remember the stdlib and the wider ecosystem has to also move in concert so the breaking changes cascade.

By major version I meant minor version, 3.13 -> 3.14 is a minor version in Python, but a major source of breaking changes, that is what I meant. There will be no Python 4

If Python actually incremented the major version every time they broke backwards compatibility, we'd be on something like Python 36 by now.

Almost every version they break existing code. This is why it's common for apps written in Python to depend on specific Python versions instead of just "anything above 3.x".

Are you suggesting to bump to Python 4 in order to be able to write `{}` instead of `set()` (or `{/}`) and simultaneously break all existing code using `{}` for dicts?

Jesus can you imagine if they announced Python 4? :-D

Breaking {} to be an empty set would be a HUGE breaking change, a _lot_ of code is already written where it is expected to be an empty dict. I don't think anyone in the Python committee would agree with breaking that

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