Strange __future__ behavior in Python 2.5

[Georg Brandl]

mdsteele at gmail.com wrote:
> My understanding of the __future__ statement is that you may say
> something like:
> 
> from __future__ import foo, bar
> 
> to enable more than one feature.  However, this does not seem to be
> working properly in 2.5; it behaves as expected when typed into the
> interactive interpreter, but not when it is in a module.  When I try to
> import the following module:
> 
> from __future__ import with_statement, division, absolute_import
> def bar():
>     print 5/3
>     with open('asdf') as f:
>         for line in f: print line.strip()
> 
> I get a warning that 'with' will soon be a reserved keyword, and a
> SyntaxError on the line with the with statement, so obviously, the
> __future__ statement is not working.  When I change the first line to:
> 
> from __future__ import with_statement
> from __future__ import division,absolute_import
> 
> then the with statement works fine.  However, the true division also
> works fine, so apparently making multiple __future__ imports on one
> line works for division, but not for with_statement.
> 
> Is this a bug, or am I misunderstanding something?  I'm using the final
> release of Python 2.5 (r25:51918, Sep 19 2006, 08:49:13) on Mac OS X.

This is a bug and has now been fixed in the SVN repo.
Thanks for bringing it up.

Georg