[Python-Dev] python-dev Summary for 2005-02-01 through 2005-02-14 [draft]

[Steven Bethard]

Here's another two skipped threads.  Ditto Tim Lesher's "comments,
criticisms, or rotten tomatoes" request. =)

-------------------------------------
2.3.5 and 2.4.1 release plans
-------------------------------------
Anthony Baxter, Alex Martelli and Tim Peters squelched a bug where
deepcopy failed on instances of types that lacked an ``__mro__``
attribute.

The patch was pretty straight-forward (use ``inspect.getmro`` instead
of ``cls.__mro__``), but coming up with a test case was hard --
creating a Python object that doesn't have an ``__mro__`` takes some
complicated C code like that of Zope's ExtensionClass.  Fortunately,
John Lenton's c.l.py suggestion to simply raise an AttributeError for
``__mro__`` in ``__getattribute__`` properly ticked the bug, and 2.3.5
was cleared for release.

Contributing Threads:
- `2.3.5 and 2.4.1 release plans
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-February/thread.html>`__

-------------------------------------
Clarification sought about including a multidimensional array object
into Python core
-------------------------------------
Travis Oliphant and others looked into the issues of including an
array object (like that of Numeric or numarray) in Python core.

Guido seemed hesitant, concerned that as Numeric and numarray continue
to co-exist, the array object wouldn't be the "best of breed" (one of
the expectations for inclusion in Python core).  Travis explained that
most of the disagreements are over ufunc objects, not the basic array
object itself, so it wouldn't be unreasonable to include the array
object without the ufunc object if necessary.  There was also some
suggestion that, at least for basic arithmetic operations, Numeric and
numarray mostly agree, so a stripped-down ufunc object for these
operations might also be inclusion-worthy.

In an aside that grew decidedly un-aside-ish, Paul F. Dubois, Guido
and David Ascher explained why matrix should not inherit from
arrayobject -- this would complicate __new__ and cause confusion when
mixed operands (arrays and matrices) are given to a binary op like
multiplication.

Contributing Threads:
- `Clarification sought about including a multidimensional array
object into Python core
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-February/051474.html>`__
- `Numeric life as I see it
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-February/051493.html>`__

Steve Bethard
--
You can wordify anything if you just verb it.
       --- Bucky Katt, Get Fuzzy