I haven't paid much attention to what's been happening to the Python Programming language since v2.3. Reading through the What's New in Python 2.5 document, though, it looks like they're rounding off a few more of the sharp edges - excellent. A couple of the syntax alterations will save me much code in future. All we need now are convenient anonymous functions, like what you get with function(args) { code } in Javascript, sub { code } in Perl, or { |args| code } in Ruby.
Some highlights:
- with foo(x) as bar: do_something(bar) calls bar.__enter__() before and bar.__exit__() after the do_something(bar) call - similar to C#'s using statement. @contextlib.contextmanager turns generators into classes, so foo(x) can be a function rather than a constructor.
- you can now send data back to an iterator with it.send(value) (which otherwise behaves like it.next()).
- try/except/else/finally can now be used together; no need to nest a try/except block inside a try/finally block.
- the fragile 'a and b or c' syntax now has a Perl/Ruby-like alternative: b if a orelse c. (Thanks to Mike for the correction here)
- 'http://example.com/'.partition("://") == ('http', '://', 'example.com/')
- startswith/endswith now save you from looping in this common use case: 'foo.jpg'.endswith(('.jpg', 'png', '.gif'))
- defaultdict is a dictionary that provides a default value when you don't supply one. So now instead of mydict = {}; mydict.setdefault(key, []).append(value), you can use mydict = defaultdict(list); mydict[key].append(value)
- msilib lets you create MS Installer .msi files.
- ctypes, which lets you load DLLs / shared libraries and call arbitrary functions in them, is now in the standard distribution.
- ElementTree is now in the standard distribution, as xml.etree.
- new hashlib module: lots o' hashes. md5, sha1, sha{224, 256, 384, 512}.
- sqlite3 is in the standard distribution!
- wsgiref, including basic http server, is now in the standard distribution!
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