Evidence that there isn’t an important problem to be solved:
- It doesn’t come up in Python training courses at all
- There don’t seem to be any prominent blog posts on the subject
- It doesn’t show up in Hacker News comments
- There don’t seem to be any recorded talks on the subject
- On StackOverflow’s 2,000,000+ Python questions, this comes up almost never
- I spend my life answering questions about Python and have never been asked about this
- It is rare to see a bug report or tracker issue where this is a root cause.
- Most Python programmers don’t even know what the “/” means in help() output – just ask around
- If you ask Python consultants what problems they are asked to solve, it won’t be mentioned
- Other prominent languages haven’t felt the need to add a “/” notation
- Ask full time code reviewers (like Jack D) whether this is a recurring or important issue (the answer is no)
The PEP isn’t wrong that there aren’t some issues. It is wrong that there about the significance being enough to warrant a grammar change that will be inflicted on 100% of the users in a way they mostly won’t be able to ignore when reading code.