[Python-Dev] python-dev Summary for 2004-11-16 through 2004-11-30 [draft]

[Brett C.]

With school starting up again Monday and New Years being tomorrow I don't plan 
to send this out until Tuesday.

Hope everyone has a good New Years.

-Brett

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Summary Announcements
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PyCon_ is coming up!  Being held March 23-25 in Washington, DC, registration is 
now open at http://www.python.org/pycon/2005/register.html for credit card 
users (you can pay by check as well; see the general info page for the conference).

.. _PyCon: http://www.python.org/pycon/2005/

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Summaries
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Would you like the source with your function?
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Would you like all functions and classes to contain a __pycode__ attribute that 
contains a string of the code used to compile that code object?  Well, that 
very idea was proposed.  You would use a command-line switch to turn on the 
feature in order to remove the memory and any performance overhead for the 
default case of not needing this feature.

Some might ask why this is needed when inspect.getsource and its ilk exist. 
The perk is that __pycode__ would always exist while inspect.getsource is a 
best attempt but cannot guarantee it will have the source.

Beyond a suggested name change to __source__, various people have suggested 
very different uses.  Some see it as a convenient way to save interpreter work 
easily and thus not lose any nice code snippet developed interactively.  Others 
see a more programmatic use (such as AOP "advice" injection).  Both are rather 
different and led to the thread ending on the suggestion that a PEP be written 
that specifies what the intended use-case to make sure that need is properly met.

Contributing threads:
   - `__pycode__ extension <>`__

===============
Skipped Threads
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- PEP 310 Status
- python 2.3.5 release?
       look for 2.3.5 possibly in January
- Current CVS, Cygwin and "make test"
- syntactic shortcut - unpack to variably sizedlist
       mostly discussed `last summary`_
- Python 2.4, MS .NET 1.1 and distutils
- Trouble installing 2.4
- Looking for authoritative documentation on packages, import & ihooks
       no docs exist, but feel free to write some!  =)
- String literal concatenation & docstrings
       literal string concatenation only works if the newline separating the 
strings is not significant to the parser
- print "%X" % id(object()) not so nice
       does 'id' need to return only a positive?  No, but it would be nice.
- Bug in PyLocale_strcoll
- Multilib strikes back
- File encodings
       file.write does not work with Unicode strings; have to decode them to 
ASCII on your own