[Python-Dev] [RELEASED] Python 3.2 alpha 3

[Mark Summerfield]

Hi Georg,

On Tue, 12 Oct 2010 14:40:52 +0200
Georg Brandl <georg at python.org> wrote:
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> On behalf of the Python development team, I'm happy to announce the
> third and final alpha preview release of Python 3.2.
[snip]

I built & ran Py3.2a4's tests & they were fine for me on Debian testing
64-bit. I also tested all the Python 3 book's examples and with one
exception---due to (3) below---they all work fine:-)

I think it might be worth mentioning in What's New:

(1) In "Other Language Changes", the second item about str() might
    benefit from a note; perhaps:

	"This change may break doctests that compare floats. (For
	example, in older Python 3's str(math.pi) produces
	'3.14159265359'.)

(2) In "New, Improved, and Deprecated Modules", it still has "XXX
    mention argparse". Maybe replace with:

	"A new option parsing module, argparse, has been added. This
	module is more flexible and pragmatic than the deprecated
	optparse module it supercedes."

    After all, the module's own documentation is sufficient for the
    details and "argparse" is a link to it.

(3) There is no mention of a subtle change in ElementTree. In older
    Python 3's xml.etree.ElementTree.parse() would raise an
    xml.parsers.expat.ExpatError if the parse failed; in 3.2a4 it seems
    to raise xml.etree.ElementTree.ParseError instead. This is much
    nicer but could probably do with a mention since it can break things
    (with an "During handling of the above exception, another exception
    occurred" error). Perhaps in the "New, Improved, and Deprecated
    Modules" you might add:

	"The xml.etree.ElementTree now raises an
	xml.etree.ElementTree.ParseError when a parse fails; previously
	it raised a xml.parsers.expat.ExpatError."

    It would also be nice to mention this in the ElementTree module's
    documentation for the parse() function.

-- 
Mark Summerfield, Qtrac Ltd, www.qtrac.eu
    C++, Python, Qt, PyQt - training and consultancy
        "Programming in Python 3" - ISBN 0321680561
            http://www.qtrac.eu/py3book.html