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Add introductory paragraphs summarizing the release; minor edits

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Andrew M. Kuchling 2006-06-20 13:05:12 +00:00
parent 5ab504ef2f
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1 changed files with 33 additions and 10 deletions
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Doc/whatsnew/whatsnew25.tex
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@ -15,18 +15,41 @@
\maketitle
\tableofcontents
This article explains the new features in Python 2.5. No release date
for Python 2.5 has been set; it will probably be released in the
autumn of 2006. \pep{356} describes the planned release schedule.
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.
Comments, suggestions, and error reports are welcome; please e-mail them
to the author or open a bug in the Python bug tracker.
% XXX Compare with previous release in 2 - 3 sentences here.
The changes in Python 2.5 are an interesting mix of language and library
changes. The library changes
will be more important to Python's user community, I think,
because several widely-useful packages were added to the standard library;
the additions include
ElementTree for XML processing (section~\ref{module-etree}),
the SQLite database module (section~\ref{module-sqlite}),
and the \module{ctypes} module for calling C functions (\section~\ref{module-ctypes}).
This article doesn't attempt to provide a complete specification of
the new features, but instead provides a convenient overview. For
full details, you should refer to the documentation for Python 2.5.
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~\ref{pep-308}. The new
'\keyword{with}' statement will make writing cleanup code easier
(section~\ref{pep-343}). Values can now be passed into generators
(section~\ref{pep-342}). Imports are now visible as either absolute
or relative (section~\ref{pep-328}). Some corner cases of exception
handling are handled better (section~\ref{pep-341}). 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.
This article doesn't attempt to be a complete specification of the new
features, but instead is a brief introduction to each new feature.
For full details, you should refer to the documentation for Python
2.5.
% XXX add hyperlink when the documentation becomes available online.
If you want to understand the complete implementation and design
rationale, refer to the PEP for a particular new feature.
@ -36,10 +59,10 @@ rationale, refer to the PEP for a particular new feature.
\section{PEP 308: Conditional Expressions\label{pep-308}}
For a long time, people have been requesting a way to write
conditional expressions, 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:
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:
\begin{verbatim}
if condition: