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."

Comments

Python Challenge

[Franio]

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.

In line conditionals, FINALLY

[gd2shoe]

Although not as elegant as:

cout << ( a==b ? "first option" : "second option" )

It is good to finally see inline conditions such as:

print ( "first option" if a==b else "second option" )

This just makes me happy! ;-)

Re:Languages continue to evolve into ... Lisp

[Scarblac]

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 :-)

Re:Woot -- conditional expressions!

[masklinn]

I suppose that would have been too easy, though.

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.

Re:try/except/else/finally

[artlogic]

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++.

WxPython

[nih]

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:)