Decided to just plow through the next Summary so that I was finally caught up. I am not expecting the candidates for taking of the Summaries to write stuff for this one (although I wouldn't mind it =). The idea of having them work together to write the Summaries has been proposed, but this is going out before I have heard back. Depending on the number of people who send in edits, this could go out the same time as the 2005-02-01 Summary or I might wait until Monday night so people who only check mail on weekdays have a chance to look at this. ------------------------------------- ===================== Summary Announcements ===================== ------------------------ Status of the candidates ------------------------ XXX ----------- PyCon Looms ----------- PyCon_ is coming! Be there or be a Java or Perl coder! .. _PyCon: http://www.pycon.org/ ========= Summaries ========= ------------- PEP movements ------------- `PEP 309`_ is now final since the 'functional' module has now been checked into Python. .. _PEP 309: http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0309.html Contributing threads: - `PEP 309 enhancements <>`__ - `PEP 309 <>`__ ------------------------------------------------------ Indices for slices other objects with __int__ not okay ------------------------------------------------------ Travis Oliphant asked if it would be possible to patch slicing so that any object that defines __int__ could be used. Guido didn't like this idea, though. Float, for instance, has __int__ defined. Guido admitted he "unfortunately copied a design mistake from C here". He said he might add a __trunc__ magic method in Python 3000 for objects that really can't be viewed as an int but are willing to have data loss to give one. Contributing threads: - `Fixing _PyEval_SliceIndex so that integer-like objects can be used <>`__ - `Fix _PyEval_SliceIndex (Take two) <>`__ -------------------------------------------- Why can't ``class C(): pass`` be acceptable? -------------------------------------------- No reason. =) So as of Python 2.5 it is acceptable to have empty parentheses for class definitions. It does create a classic class and not a new-style one. Contributing threads: - `Requesting that a class be a new-style class <>`__ ---------------------------------- What basestring is truly meant for ---------------------------------- What is basestring for? According to Guido it is purely for unicode and str to inherit from to help with checks in code where either type is acceptable. It is *not* meant to be used as a base class for any other classes. Contributing threads: - `UserString <>`__ ------------------------------------------------------ Quickly opening an SF bug/patch in Firefox/Thunderbird ------------------------------------------------------ Martin v. Löwis posted a way to use the DictionarySearch_ plug-in for Mozilla to launch a browser with the highlighted patch/bug #. See the email for the thread on how to get it to work. .. _DictionarySearch: http://dictionarysearch.mozdev.org/download.php/http://downloads.mozdev.org/... Contributing threads: - `Quick access to Python bug reports in Thunderbird <>`__ -------------------------------- Optimizing ``x in [1, 2, 3]`` -------------------------------- Raymond Hettinger has been trying to teach the peepholer some new tricks to optimize ``x in [1, 2, 3]`` and the like into a faster operation. Initially he got it to change the list to a tuple. He then tried turning the list into a frozenset, but that had the unforeseen issue of breaking semantics since it then required the object being checked for to be hashable. So Raymond suggested introducing a SearchSet that tried the comparison as a frozenset first, and upon failure of hashing, to old way of just looking at each item in the list. But this seemed like overkill since most lists would be small; probably usually under 4 items. But Fredrik Lundh suggested expanding it to ``x == 1 or x == 2 or x == 3``. This seemed like a performance boost when the items of the list were lists since the COMPARE_OP opcode special-cases comparing ints. But for other instances it probably isn't worth it unless more special-casing is done in the opcodes. Contributing threads: - `Prospective Peephole Transformation <>`__ ------------------ A DupStore opcode? ------------------ Raymond Hettinger suggested a new opcode called DupStore that would replace load;store opcode pairs. Guido questioned if this was leading down a road of adding too much extra code for little benefit. Off this a discussion about speeding up frame allocation, an area viewed as needing some optimization, started up. Contributing threads: - `Store x Load x --> DupStore <>`__ =============== Skipped Threads =============== + pymalloc on 2.1.3 + Exceptions *must*? be old-style classes? + subclassing PyCFunction_Type + Windows Low Fragementation Heap yields speedup of ~15% + string find(substring) vs. substring in string + [ python-Bugs-1124637 ] test_subprocess is far too slow (fwd) + Five review rule on the /dev/ page? + Some old patches + Comment regarding PEP 328