recommended __future__ imports for 2.5?

Joe Strout joe at strout.net
Mon Nov 24 15:36:32 EST 2008


OK, this will probably be placed into the "stupid question" category  
by some, but I really am in need of a bit of guidance here.

I just rediscovered the "gotcha" of integer division in 2.5 and below,  
and found (to my delight) that this is fixed in 3.0, and fixable in  
older versions of Python with "from __future__ import division".  Once  
I stumbled across that, I was able to find the relevant PEP (#238) and  
read more about it.  So now that import has become part of our  
standard boilerplate at the top of each file, along with the path to  
Python and the UTF-8 encoding declaration.

Now I'm wondering what other boilerplate I should be using.  I'm not  
yet ready to upgrade to Python 2.6 -- parts of our business model rely  
on using the standard Python installed with Mac OS X (which is  
currently 2.5.1).  But I would like our code to be as future-proof as  
possible, especially in cases like this where we're talking about  
changes to existing behavior, rather than the introduction of entirely  
new features (like the "with" statement).

I found <http://www.python.org/doc/2.5.2/ref/future.html>, which lists  
the available future imports, but doesn't link to any documentation on  
them.  Searching for each one on google turns up some probably- 
relevant PEPs, but it's hard for a relative newbie to tell for sure  
exactly what was implemented when and which is merely a summary of  
discussion.

So... besides "division", are there any other imports you would  
recommend as standard for any new code written in 2.5?  And what else  
do you experienced gurus put at the top of every Python file?

Thanks,
- Joe






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