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Python 2.5 Released
dominator writes "It's been nearly 20 months since the last major release of the Python programming language, and version 2.5 is probably the most significant new release of Python since 2.2. The latest release includes a variety of additions to the standard library, language extensions, and performance optimizations. This is a final release, and should be suitable for production use. Read the release announcement, the highlights, what's new, and download it."
I know this is offtopic but does anyone know what happened to the python challenge?
There have been no new levels for a long time.
For those who haven't seen it, the python challenge is a great way to learn python.
From TFA:
In keeping with the theme of adding tried and true packages to the standard library, in 2.5 we've added ctypes, ElementTree, hashlib, sqlite3 and wsgiref to the standard library that ships with Python.
That made me sit up and take notice. A pretty nice programming language with built-in functionality to read and write Sqlite databases natively?
Looks like they release a Mac installer, too. Think I'll have to check it out when I get home
Cheers
It is good to finally see inline conditions such as:
This just makes me happy!
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
I think C is too hard for most programmers too. I may be in a bad mood, but I think most programmers do PHP and Visual Basic, badly. They wouldn't grasp Lisp's macros. Of actually good programmers, a very small percentage know Lisp; I wouldn't start a professional project in it for that reason.
I personally love Python (used it for all the code I wrote for my thesis), but these days I program Perl at work. It's not that bad, really. It makes sense, in its own way and it's got a good solid set of libraries available out there. Java isn't half bad for bigger projects either, actually.
About half a year ago, I tried to get into Lisp. It sounds like the holy grail - execution speed and error checking of a compiled language with all the speed of development of more dynamic languages. Perhaps s-expressions should be perfectly suited for HTML too (I'm still stuck in this web app world, at the moment). So I picked up Practical Common Lisp, installed SBCL, joined some mailing lists, found some libraries, got experimenting...
Two things meant I got disinterested in a month or so: it has far too many slightly-differently-named functions in the standard language, many with non-obvious names too (that's what PHP gets its harshest criticism for); and also the huge library of things you need nowadays (internet stuff, databases, OS stuff, etc) is either missing or rather undeveloped.
But it's still promising. I'll probably have another look in a few more months :-)
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
Dive Into Python really helped me to get started. You can buy it as a book, but it's also available for free on the web. Guido's own tutorial is also a good way to get started, as python's creator wrote it himself, and is a pretty good teacher too. Both of these are no big secret, but both are well written and clear, so i'd check them out first before looking for more detailed tutorials. Python's official documentation/website are really so good that looking elsewhere is for the most part unnecessary.
It's not about "too easy", it was rejected after lenghy discussions on python-dev. You can read explanations, modivations, and get links to quite a lot of discussions on the PEP 308 - Conditional Expressions page.
Whatever your thought on the result is, don't think for a second that the decision of this was easy, or a side-note on a receipt.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
You would include logic in the else to be executed in the case that no exceptions occur, that is:
else:
print "no exceptions occured!"
Everything else is the same as Java/C++.
"A Mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems." ~ Paul Erdos
anyone using wxpython will need to upgrade to wxpython for python 2.5
http://www.wxpython.org/download.php
as soon as i'd installed python 2.5 all my app died, took me a few mins
to realise that py2.5 breaks wxpython for py2.4, and some tk demo's ran:)
I'm a rabbit startled by the headlights of life
The code that you run after the part you may want to protect could thrown an exception that you wouldn't want to catch in your except handlers.
The else clause gives you a way to run it without the risk of shadowing/accidentaly catching these exceptions.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Migrating from Python to Ruby is trivial, they're 95% identical. Some idioms are different such as Ruby's use of anonymous functions (called blocks) and different ways of metaprogramming (plus the fact that Ruby uses metaprogrammatic abilities much more often than Python), but the difference between them is far smaller than some people make it to be.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Dive Into Python is great, but it has the problem of being old. So old, in fact, that so far I haven't found anything from it that doesn't work perfectly in Jython. That might not seem like much, until you realize that Jython is still not quite at the Python 2.2 stage yet: more than three years behind.
Not that I dislike Jython. Quite the contrary: I use it more than I use cPython, for a variety of reasons. But its development is going slowly enough that it's making me want to brush up on my Java so I could help out.