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

Re:In line conditionals, FINALLY

[Pope Raymond Lama]

Indeed, I got puzzled about the choice for this syntax.

They explain why, whether one agrees or not with it, in this part of the release notes.

In short, there was some discussion on the mailing lists about whether the syntax should be, and no clear winner could be appointed. Then, the BDFL figured out that whenever conditional expressions are used, one of the values is usually the norm and the other the exception, thus, putting the normal value at the beggning of the expression made it for code readability.

From the URL above:
"""\
This syntax may seem strange and backwards; why does the condition go in the middle of the expression, and not in the front as in C's c ? x : y? The decision was checked by applying the new syntax to the modules in the standard library and seeing how the resulting code read. In many cases where a conditional expression is used, one value seems to be the 'common case' and one value is an 'exceptional case', used only on rarer occasions when the condition isn't met. The conditional syntax makes this pattern a bit more obvious:
contents = ((doc + '\n') if doc else '')
"""