[triangle-zpug] Alex Martelli on Python 2.5

[Chris Calloway]

If you are reading this on the PyCamp mailing list, please subscribe to 
the TriZPUG mailing list. And don't forget the TriZPUG meeting tonight.

Alex Martelli is the fine author of Python in a Nutshell. I you came to 
PyCamp and want a more reference-manual-like Python book, get Alex's 
book. It takes ten times as long to read as Dive Into Python. But it 
leaves no stone unturned.

Python 2.5 is now in release candidate mode. It may even get released 
this month. And Alex has made a nice Python 2.5 presentation for his 
user group in San Francisco:

http://www.aleax.it/Python/penlug06.pdf

If you came to PyCamp, there are some things to note about Python 2.5 
from Alex's presentation:

1) New "RAII" (Resource Allocation Is Initialization) programming model 
implemented with the new "with" statement. This helps you be a good 
resource citizen. And Python is the first to make this part of the base 
language. It treats system resources much like memory is treated by 
garbage collection. When you are finished with a system resource, its 
close method automatically gets called.

2) try/except/else/finally are now unified. You can have a "finally" 
with "except" and "else." It actually condenses the nested 
try/except/else within a try/finally which you saw at PyCamp. The 
unified version is, or course, more readable because flat is better than 
nested.

3) There's a new "ternary" if/else operator. You no longer have to do 
the "and-or" trick to mimic a ternary operator. (Although you still need 
to understand the "and-or" trick in order to read most pre-existing code).

4) If you use scientific packages which make use of C and Fortran 
libraries, the ctypes module is now "built-in." You can now crash Python 
to your heart's delight by using poorly written C and Fortran modules. :)

5) A new built-in package, xml.etree, is a "highly Pythonic in-memory 
representation of XML document as tree, much slimmer and faster than 
xml.dom." It's highly Pythonic because "each XML element is a bit like a 
list of its children merged with a dict of its attrs." That is, you get 
back things that look and act like Python sequences and mappings instead 
of getting back complex objects where you have to call methods on the 
objects in order to get the sequences and mappings you really want. You 
can also make these sequences and mappings act like you want with 
special methods.

6) sqlite is now a built-in module. sqlite helps you prototype SQL 
applications before having to set up and connect to big SQL servers like 
Oracle or PostGreSQL. Some applications like Trac actually use SQLite 
for production. (Trac is also written in Python.) I've had no problem 
hacking the SQLite databases in my Trac instances using Python when I 
wanted to automate reorganizing the wiki page hierarchy in Trac.

7) Make note of how many new Python 2.5 features make use of wrapper 
classes.

I sure hope this means Alex is going to update Python in a Nutshell.

Also, Python 2.3.5 is good to use for a long, long time. It is very 
stable, well understood, and well liked.

-- 
Sincerely,

Chris Calloway
http://www.seacoos.org
office: 17-6 Venable Hall   phone: (919) 962-4323
mail: Campus Box #3300, UNC-CH, Chapel Hill, NC 27599