Python 2.6 Released

http://www.python.org/download/releases/2.6/

by forsaken • 18 years ago

130 31 18 years ago

python.org

known• 18 years ago

You may download Python 2.x and Python 3.0 books at http://www.swaroopch.com/notes/Python

silentbicycle2• 18 years ago

Also, Dive into Python (http://diveintopython.org/) is excellent, and the text is free online.

tjmc• 18 years ago

This is exactly what I've been looking for. Thank you!

BrandonM• 18 years ago

I still don't fully understand decorators, but it's definitely true that implementing context managers with decorators is much more succinct and straightforward than manually writing __enter__ and __exit__ methods. And context managers are definitely a win.

kaens• 18 years ago

Are decorators more than syntactic sugar for functions that take functions?

irrelative• 18 years ago

Delicious, delicious syntactic sugar :)

llimllib2• 18 years ago

  # No. This code:
  @decorate
  def foo(self):
    frobnicate()

  #is exactly equivalent to:
  def foo(self):
    frobnicate()
  foo = decorate(foo)

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0318/

schtog• 18 years ago

Useful example, adding memoization without rewriting the actual function, just add @decoratorname above the function.

class memoize: def __init__(self, function): self.function = function self.memoized = {}

    def __call__(self, *args):
        try:
            return self.memoized[args]
        except KeyError:
            self.memoized[args] = self.function(*args)
            return self.memoized[args]


  @memoize
  def fib(n)

illume5• 18 years ago

It drops support for 'older' versions of windows...

Including older versions of win2k, winme, win98 etc. They're not only not supporting it, but they've removed code for older versions of windows.

So if you want to distribute portable apps, don't use 2.6+

rbanffy2• 18 years ago

But who in his right mind would recommend people to use Windows versions prior to 2000?

bayareaguy• 18 years ago

I would, especially for people who use their computers mostly for business. Except for USB and PNP support, Windows 2000 is inferior to NT4SP2.

However the Python guys are probably doing the right thing here because the right approach to making windows based business systems reliable is to disable everything possible on them, isolate them as much as you can, get things working and NOT upgrade them unless you absolutely have to.

illume5• 18 years ago

If you make applications for windows, then you would understand that people either can't upgrade or won't. Their old machines don't work with newer versions of the OS's.

For web developers this is fine, since they don't need to install programs. However for those of us that need to install programs, it's going to be sticking with python2.5 (or even 2.3 if you want better compatibility).

greyman• 18 years ago

>> But who in his right mind would recommend people to use Windows versions prior to 2000?

I think this is a wrong question in this context. Software developer don't recommend OS to people, he delivers software, and the more platforms he supports, the better.

Moreover, if someone has an old box with 98 or NT, what could he do when he don't want to buy a new PC?

johnp• 18 years ago

Remember though, Microsoft does not even support these many of those products anymore: http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifeselectwin

Even .NET is not available on Windows 98/Me: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=262...

pchivers• 18 years ago

Windows 2000 still has extended support for another 21 months, so I would definitely be disappointed if it wasn't supported in Python 2.6.

http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?LN=en-ca&x=24...

rwiser• 18 years ago

I would be surprised if 2.6 did _not_ run on WinNT, Win2K or later. I know they dropped support for Win9x variants (Win95, WinME or earlier).

Do you have a reference on Python 2.6 dropping support for win2k?

tcskeptic• 18 years ago

From here: http://docs.python.org/whatsnew/2.6.html

It is pretty clear that support for WIN2K, at least SP4 is NOT being dropped.

"The support for Windows 95, 98, ME and NT4 has been dropped. Python 2.6 requires at least Windows 2000 SP4."

jodrellblank• 18 years ago

That rather depends on your definition of portable - I mean, even if they included win98, you'd still likely be stuck with Python 1.5 for Windows CE 1, and no Python for many systems.

That it works on several of the most common, different, platforms in use today, I vote that counts as "portable" - reasonably so.

Another way of looking at it is not how many Win98 systems are there, but that there is (presumably) nobody willing to jump in and argue and offer to support Python 2.6 on Win98 - so how in demand can it be?

illume5• 18 years ago

python 2.5 works fine with win95 and win98.

We're talking at least 1%-3%1 of machines on the internet here. That's a sizable chunk of people.

based on wc3 stats... which aren't all that representative.

nadim• 18 years ago

A good read: http://docs.python.org/whatsnew/2.6.html

illume5• 18 years ago

You'll notice the usual benchmark section is missing from there. The one that tells you python 2.6 is XXX% faster than python2.5

This is because often 2.6 is slower than 2.5. http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2008-September/0...

Some things are faster, and some are slower. But for the normal benchmarks mentioned in the release notes (for 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, and 2.5), it's slower overall.

llimllib2• 18 years ago

  $ python2.6 /opt/local/lib/python2.5/test/pystone.py
  Pystone(1.1) time for 50000 passes = 0.867314
  This machine benchmarks at 57649.2 pystones/second

  $ python2.5 /opt/local/lib/python2.5/test/pystone.py
  Pystone(1.1) time for 50000 passes = 0.970622
  This machine benchmarks at 51513.4 pystones/second

(which is not to say it's always, or even usually faster; just that it's certainly faster on the standard benchmark)

illume5• 18 years ago

It also doesn't work on FreeBSD/OpenBSD. Though they plan to fix that at least.

silentbicycle2• 18 years ago

It looks like it's coming along on OpenBSD: http://www.nabble.com/UPDATE:-python-2.6,-unbreak-python-2.5...

Python 2.6 Released

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