Joe Strout wrote:
OK, this will probably be placed into the "stupid question" category by
some, but I really am in need of a bit of guidance here.
I just rediscovered the "gotcha" of integer division in 2.5 and below,
and found (to my delight) that this is fixed in 3.0, and fixable in
older versions of Python with "from __future__ import division". Once I
stumbled across that, I was able to find the relevant PEP (#238) and
read more about it. So now that import has become part of our standard
boilerplate at the top of each file, along with the path to Python and
the UTF-8 encoding declaration.
Now I'm wondering what other boilerplate I should be using. I'm not yet
ready to upgrade to Python 2.6 -- parts of our business model rely on
using the standard Python installed with Mac OS X (which is currently
2.5.1). But I would like our code to be as future-proof as possible,
especially in cases like this where we're talking about changes to
existing behavior, rather than the introduction of entirely new features
(like the "with" statement).
I found <http://www.python.org/doc/2.5.2/ref/future.html>, which lists
the available future imports, but doesn't link to any documentation on
them. Searching for each one on google turns up some probably-relevant
PEPs, but it's hard for a relative newbie to tell for sure exactly what
was implemented when and which is merely a summary of discussion.
So... besides "division", are there any other imports you would
recommend as standard for any new code written in 2.5? And what else do
you experienced gurus put at the top of every Python file?
2.5 (and 2.3 and 2.2) already has 'generators' and 'nested_scopes', so
forget those unless programming for 2.2-.
"with_statement" is needed if and only if you use a with statement.
"absolute_import" ? I don't know what difference that makes. The doc on
the import statement might say.
tjr
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