Python 2.5 Alpha
Looks like an alpha version of Python 2.5 is available. All of the changes sound pretty useful, some of them I wish Python 2.4 had right now. My favorites are:
- A Python equivalent to the ternary operator: conditional expressions.
- Unified try/except/finally. When I learned that Python currently has two different types of try statements, I was annoyed but not surprised. Pythons quirkiness is one of the reasons it will never be my favorite language.
- The "with" statement, a feature most quickly understood by reading the example code. As it happens, I've been thinking about how to best achieve this type of functionality in one of my current projects. Whatever I settle on, it is certain to be less elegant.
- Probably inspired by Ruby, the new ctype module can be used to call arbitrary functions in shared libraries.
- Support for sqlite3 will be a standard part of Python.
- Various minor changes to make Python more consistent and less quirky.
