Python 2.5, me Maties!

What's in the brand spanking new Python 2.5 for geospatial folks? New standard libs:

  • ctypes: call functions exposed from DLLs and shared libraries. This gives us an even more direct way to leverage geospatial libraries than SWIG does.

  • ElementTree: the natural way to program with XML now ships with Python.

  • cProfile: I've been using the slow profile.py quite a bit in developing the Python cartographic library. This more efficient module comes out of Google's Summer of Code.

Completed PEPs:

  • 341: Consistent exception handling -- finally.

  • 343: Context management not unlike Ruby blocks.

Python 2.5 is also significantly faster than 2.4, string programming in particular.