Py 2.6 changes

[bearophileHUGS at lycos.com]

I have just re-read the list of changes in Python 2.6, it's huge,
there are tons of changes and improvements, I'm really impressed:
http://docs.python.org/dev/whatsnew/2.6.html

I'll need many days to learn all those changes! I can see it fixes
several of the missing things/problems I have found in Python in the
past, like the lack of information regarding the floating point it
uses, etc.
I have seen that many (smart) updates are from Hettinger.

You can see a language gets better when you can remove often-used
commodity functions/classes from your own 'bag of tricks' :-) (Like
the permutations() function, etc).

>Python now must be compiled with C89 compilers (after 19 years!). This means that the Python source tree has dropped its own implementations of memmove and strerror, which are in the C89 standard library.<

I presume it's better for me to not hold my breath while I wait
CPython to be written in C99 :-)


Now math has factorial:
http://docs.python.org/dev/library/math.html#math.factorial
Seen how reduce() is removed from Python 3 (I know it's in itertools),
and seeing that for me to write a productory() function was the first
usage I have had for reduce, years ago, I think the math module can
gain a productory() function too.


For Python 2.7/3.1 I'd now like to write a PEP regarding the
underscores into the number literals, like: 0b_0101_1111, 268_435_456
etc. I use such underscores all the time in the D language, and I
think they can be a tiny but significant improvement for Python (and
underscore is much better than just a space, because the underscore
helps the person that reads the code to understand that's a single
number).

Bye,
bearophile