python-dev Summary for 2004-11-16 through 2004-11-30

This is a summary of traffic on the python-dev mailing list from November 16, 2004 through November 30, 2004. It is intended to inform the wider Python community of on-going developments on the list. To comment on anything mentioned here, just post to comp.lang.python (or email python-list at python dot org which is a gateway to the newsgroup) with a subject line mentioning what you are discussing. All python-dev members are interested in seeing ideas discussed by the community, so don't hesitate to take a stance on something. And if all of this really interests you then get involved and join python-dev!

This is the fifty-third summary written by Brett Cannon (Another quarter begins).

To contact me, please send email to brett at python.org ; I do not have the time to keep up on comp.lang.python and thus do not always catch follow-ups posted there.

All summaries are archived at http://www.python.org/dev/summary/ .

Please note that this summary is written using reStructuredText which can be found at http://docutils.sf.net/rst.html . Any unfamiliar punctuation is probably markup for reST (otherwise it is probably regular expression syntax or a typo =); you can safely ignore it, although I suggest learning reST; it's simple and is accepted for PEP markup and gives some perks for the HTML output. Also, because of the wonders of programs that like to reformat text, I cannot guarantee you will be able to run the text version of this summary through Docutils as-is unless it is from the original text file.

The in-development version of the documentation for Python can be found at http://www.python.org/dev/doc/devel/ and should be used when looking up any documentation on new code; otherwise use the current documentation as found at http://docs.python.org/ . PEPs (Python Enhancement Proposals) are located at http://www.python.org/peps/ . To view files in the Python CVS online, go to http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/python/ . Reported bugs and suggested patches can be found at the SourceForge project page.

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Contents

python-dev Summary for 2004-11-16 through 2004-11-30

Summary Announcements

PyCon is coming up! Being held March 23-25 in Washington, DC, registration is now open at http://www.python.org/pycon/2005/register.html for credit card users (you can pay by check as well; see the general info page for the conference).

Summaries

Would you like the source with your function?

Would you like all functions and classes to contain a __pycode__ attribute that contains a string of the code used to compile that code object? Well, that very idea was proposed. You would use a command-line switch to turn on the feature in order to remove the memory and any performance overhead for the default case of not needing this feature.

Some might ask why this is needed when inspect.getsource and its ilk exist. The perk is that __pycode__ would always exist while inspect.getsource is a best attempt but cannot guarantee it will have the source.

Beyond a suggested name change to __source__, various people have suggested very different uses. Some see it as a convenient way to save interpreter work easily and thus not lose any nice code snippet developed interactively. Others see a more programmatic use (such as AOP "advice" injection). Both are rather different and led to the thread ending on the suggestion that a PEP be written that specifies what the intended use-case to make sure that need is properly met.

Contributing threads:

__pycode__ extension

Skipped Threads

PEP 310 Status
python 2.3.5 release?

look for 2.3.5 possibly in January
Current CVS, Cygwin and "make test"
syntactic shortcut - unpack to variably sizedlist

mostly discussed last summary
Python 2.4, MS .NET 1.1 and distutils
Trouble installing 2.4
Looking for authoritative documentation on packages, import & ihooks

no docs exist, but feel free to write some! =)
String literal concatenation & docstrings

literal string concatenation only works if the newline separating the strings is not significant to the parser
print "%X" % id(object()) not so nice

does 'id' need to return only a positive? No, but it would be nice.
Bug in PyLocale_strcoll
Multilib strikes back
File encodings

file.write does not work with Unicode strings; have to decode them to ASCII on your own