I have just re-read the list of changes in Python 2.6, it's huge, there are tons of changes and improvements, I'm really impressed: http://docs.python.org/dev/whatsnew/2.6.html
I'll need many days to learn all those changes! I can see it fixes several of the missing things/problems I have found in Python in the past, like the lack of information regarding the floating point it uses, etc. I have seen that many (smart) updates are from Hettinger. You can see a language gets better when you can remove often-used commodity functions/classes from your own 'bag of tricks' :-) (Like the permutations() function, etc). >Python now must be compiled with C89 compilers (after 19 years!). This means >that the Python source tree has dropped its own implementations of memmove and >strerror, which are in the C89 standard library.< I presume it's better for me to not hold my breath while I wait CPython to be written in C99 :-) Now math has factorial: http://docs.python.org/dev/library/math.html#math.factorial Seen how reduce() is removed from Python 3 (I know it's in itertools), and seeing that for me to write a productory() function was the first usage I have had for reduce, years ago, I think the math module can gain a productory() function too. For Python 2.7/3.1 I'd now like to write a PEP regarding the underscores into the number literals, like: 0b_0101_1111, 268_435_456 etc. I use such underscores all the time in the D language, and I think they can be a tiny but significant improvement for Python (and underscore is much better than just a space, because the underscore helps the person that reads the code to understand that's a single number). Bye, bearophile -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
