[Python-Dev] 2.0 articles

[Greg Wilson]

> Andrew Kuchling wrote:
> Before we all become focused on new features for Python 2.1, it would be
> nice to do a bit more work on raising awareness of the new features in 2.0.  

"Doctor Dobb's Journal" would be very interested in articles --- 3000 words
(plus or minus), plus some code examples and diagrams.

> * Unicode support.  (Perl's UTF-8 support still seems incomplete, with
>   developers referring to it as "unusable", so we should definitely try and
>   point out that we have working Unicode support right now.)

Definitely --- the practical details of implementing Unicode, and a
Unicode-aware regular expression engine, would be very interesting to our
readers.  However, please steer clear of saying, "And anyway, Perl is broken."
(I just got a review copy of Hunt and Thomas's book on Ruby.  There are three
places in the first two chapters where they say, "And Ruby has more users in
Japan than Python."  I'll finish the book anyway.)

> * Distutils: an introduction to writing setup scripts for simple
>   Python modules, packages, and C extensions.

Possibly interesting; would be more so if Distutils could be applied/was being
applied to installation problems in other languages.

> * The new XML tools.

Definitely.

> * The new gettext support.
> * Maybe the linuxaudiodev module, too.

These are both probably too specialized...

> Any other suggestions?

The garbage collector: Java and Ruby both score points by having full garbage
collection, so its availability in Python 2.0 (along with a discussion of the
things that might break or change as a result) would be very interesting.

Thanks,
Greg (a contributing editor with DDJ)