[Tutor] OT: Python 2.5 (Was Re: Length of longest item in a list, using a list comp)

[Tim Golden]

Chris Hengge wrote:
> I hope this is related enough for this thread, but I'm curious why 
> people didn't seem to unanimously jump into 2.5 upon release. Python 
> seems very good about holding its backward compatibility vs some other 
> languages I've dealt with like C# that seems to require applications 
> rewritten with every patch. Was there just nothing that "grand" about 
> the new version? I've personally held back just because most of the 
> documentation I've come across is for 2.4, and until I get a firmer feel 
> for the language I'm trying to not mix things up.

Speaking for myself as a Win32 user, you generally have to
recompile / download compiled binaries for any new release
of Python. I have downloaded 2.5 and there certainly are
things which interest me, but I won't shift to using it
for mainstream work until all the modules I need are
available at 2.5. (For the most part I could compile
them myself with mingw32, but you start to realise just
how much work is involved when you need to download
libs and headers for all the externals. So I'm lazy and
wait for the project maintainer to supply...).

Also I'm faintly chary of starting to use some whizz-bang
new feature (like the with block) which is incompatible
with 2.4 and then trying to run the code on my webserver
where I've only got 2.4!

TJG