Python 2.5 的新功能

作者 :

A.M. Kuchling

This article explains the new features in Python 2.5. The final release of Python 2.5 is scheduled for August 2006; PEP 356 describes the planned release schedule. Python 2.5 was released on September 19, 2006.

The changes in Python 2.5 are an interesting mix of language and library improvements. The library enhancements will be more important to Python’s user community, I think, because several widely useful packages were added. New modules include ElementTree for XML processing ( xml.etree ), the SQLite database module ( sqlite ), and the ctypes module for calling C functions.

The language changes are of middling significance. Some pleasant new features were added, but most of them aren’t features that you’ll use every day. Conditional expressions were finally added to the language using a novel syntax; see section PEP 308: Conditional Expressions . The new ‘ with ’ statement will make writing cleanup code easier (section PEP 343: The ‘with’ statement ). Values can now be passed into generators (section PEP 342: New Generator Features ). Imports are now visible as either absolute or relative (section PEP 328: Absolute and Relative Imports ). Some corner cases of exception handling are handled better (section PEP 341: Unified try/except/finally ). All these improvements are worthwhile, but they’re improvements to one specific language feature or another; none of them are broad modifications to Python’s semantics.

As well as the language and library additions, other improvements and bugfixes were made throughout the source tree. A search through the SVN change logs finds there were 353 patches applied and 458 bugs fixed between Python 2.4 and 2.5. (Both figures are likely to be underestimates.)

This article doesn’t try to be a complete specification of the new features; instead changes are briefly introduced using helpful examples. For full details, you should always refer to the documentation for Python 2.5 at https://docs.python.org . If you want to understand the complete implementation and design rationale, refer to the PEP for a particular new feature.

Comments, suggestions, and error reports for this document are welcome; please e-mail them to the author or open a bug in the Python bug tracker.

PEP 308: Conditional Expressions

For a long time, people have been requesting a way to write conditional expressions, which are expressions that return value A or value B depending on whether a Boolean value is true or false. A conditional expression lets you write a single assignment statement that has the same effect as the following:

if condition:
    x = true_value
else:
    x = false_value