Python 1.6 progress
===================
David Ascher announced the first beta release of ActivePython 1.6,
build 100. "ActivePython contains the convenience of swift
installation, coupled with commonly used modules, providing you with a
total package to meets your Python needs. Additionally, for Windows
users, ActivePython provides a suite of Windows tools, developed by
Mark Hammond."
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2000-August/008835.html
The binary distribution can be downloaded from:
http://www.ActiveState.com/Products/ActivePython/
Python 2.0 progress
===================
The current plan is to release Python 2.0b1 around Monday, Sept. 4.
This represents a slip of about a week from the previously planned
date. The release is *very* close now, since the flurry of patches is
now focusing on cosmetic matters such as READMEs and NEWS files. At
this point, 2.0 is considered to be in feature freeze; any PEPs that
haven't been rejected outright will have to be postponed until Python
2.1 (or whatever the next version is numbered).
After months of discussion, the augmented assignment patch was checked
in. Python 2.0 will support statements such as 'L[3] += 1' as C does,
though there's no ++ or -- to increment or decrement by 1. The patch
was written by Thomas Wouters, using changes to Python's grammar by
Michael Hudson.
Thomas also spearheaded a patch for renaming objects on import that
quickly went through a few versions, and was checked in. The patch
adds 'import name1 as name2' and 'from module import name1 as name2'
as legal Python syntax.
Not all the suggested language changes went in; a patch to add range
literals was defeated. The patch would have made 'for i in [1:10]'
equivalent to 'for i in range(1,10)'. The general reaction was that
people liked the idea, but no one was very enamored of the [1:10]
syntax. Tim Peters's opinion is representative. "As the reviewer, I
spent about 2 hours playing with it, trying it out in my code. And I
simply liked it less the more I used it." In the same posting Tim
proposed an alternate syntax inspired by Haskell.
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2000-August/008864.html
Tim Peters wrote a PEP, #223, enshrining the change to the
interpretation of \x (as mentioned in the previous python-dev
summary):
http://python.sourceforge.net/peps/pep-0223.html
Certain unlimited recursions can make Python dump core; there's a
maximum recursion limit, but certain execution paths can sidestep the
limit checks and run until the stack overflows and the interpreter
dies. On Windows and MacOS, there's a PyOS_CheckStack() function that
can check whether the stack is nearing overflow. Jeremy Hylton
wondered about whether it's possible to write a similar function for
Unix. Start with Jeremy's post and then read the lengthy resulting
thread:
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2000-August/008904.html
Near the end of the month, a discussion started about the possibility
of adding a pragma statement. M.-A. Lemburg: "I've been tossing some
ideas around w/r to adding pragma style declarations to Python and
would like to hear what you think about these: ..."
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2000-August/008833.html
Greg Wilson was supportive but warned that the mechanism should be a
general one: "Pragmas are a way to give instructions to the
interpreter; when you let people give something instructions, you're
letting them program it, and I think it's best to design your
mechanism from the start to support that."
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2000-August/008893.html
Greg Ewing, on the other hand, thought pragmas are a bad idea: "As
this discussion demonstrates, it's far too fuzzy and open-ended a
concept -- nobody can agree on what sort of thing a pragma is supposed
to be."
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2000-August/008979.html
A mailing list was created to discuss BeOpen.com's license for Python
2.0:
http://mailman.beopen.com/mailman/listinfo/license-py20
Guido's announcement: "Now that the CNRI license issues are nearly
settled, BeOpen.com needs to put its own license on Python 2.0 (as a
derivative work of CNRI's Python 1.6) too. We want an open discussion
about the new license with the Python community, and have established
a mailing list for this purpose."
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2000-August/008856.html
Other matters
=============
comp.lang.python.announce is finally back! Only a single moderator
was named in the CFV for c.l.py.a, and he's been busy or otherwise
difficult to contact for a long time, so the newsgroup has been
effectively dead. The problem has now been solved, by giving Mailman
the ability to gateway a mailing list to a moderated newsgroup and
creating a list of moderators who can approve postings. Submissions
should be sent to <python-announce@python.org>.
There was some worrying on python-list about whether changes are being
added too quickly to Python 2.0, resulting in less stability. Skip
Montanaro wrote a rebuttal: "Many of the things that are new in 2.0
have been proposed on the list off and on for a long time. Unicode
support, list comprehensions, augmented assignment and extensions to
the print statement come to mind. They are not new ideas tossed in
with a beer chaser (like "<blink>")."
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2000-August/008811.html
Tim O'Malley's Cookie.py module has been added to the standard
library. Some subsequent discussion followed about whether to drop
the SerialCookie and SmartCookie classes, since they unpickle
untrusted data, and are therefore unsafe: "Question: should
SerialCookie and SmartCookie be removed? If they're not there, people
won't accidentally use them because they didn't read the docs and
missed the warning."
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2000-August/008957.html
Barry Warsaw checked in his Python implementation of a gettext module,
for internationalizing programs by providing translations of output
messages: "My goal was to build a fast C wrapper module around the C
library, and to provide a pure Python implementation of an identical
API for platforms without GNU gettext."
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2000-August/008537.html
Charles Waldman finally tracked down the cause of the mysterious
test_fork1.py crash, and submitted a patch to fix it that was accepted:
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2000-August/008558.html
AMK suggested adding a convenience API function to insert an integer
into a module dictionary, since several modules contain duplicated
code to do that. "Suggested prototype and name:
PyDict_InsertInteger(dict *, string, long)"
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2000-August/008498.html
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