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Highlights of the new 2.5 version:

Quote:More Reliable

Python now uses the Buildbot tool for continuous testing on a wide range of platforms. This allows us to spot problems faster during development, and resulted in a much more robust release.

Andrew Kuchling determined that there were over 350 patches and over 450 bugs fixed since Python 2.4.

Faster

A number of optimizations came out of the NeedForSpeed sprint in Iceland. There were major speedups in exception handling and string operations, as well as a number of other changes to improve performance.

New language features

Internally, the Python compiler now converts the source code to an abstract syntax tree (AST) before producing the bytecode.

The 'with' operator replaces a common try/finally idiom that results in much cleaner and safer code...

full article: http://www.python.org/download/releases/2.5/highlights/

What's new:

Quote:# 1 PEP 308: Conditional Expressions
# 2 PEP 309: Partial Function Application
# 3 PEP 314: Metadata for Python Software Packages v1.1
# 4 PEP 328: Absolute and Relative Imports
# 5 PEP 338: Executing Modules as Scripts
# 6 PEP 341: Unified try/except/finally
# 7 PEP 342: New Generator Features
# 8 PEP 343: The 'with' statement

    * 8.1 Writing Context Managers
    * 8.2 The contextlib module

# 9 PEP 352: Exceptions as New-Style Classes
# 10 PEP 353: Using ssize_t as the index type
# 11 PEP 357: The '__index__' method
# 12 Other Language Changes

    * 12.1 Interactive Interpreter Changes
    * 12.2 Optimizations

# 13 New, Improved, and Removed Modules

    * 13.1 The ctypes package
    * 13.2 The ElementTree package
    * 13.3 The hashlib package
    * 13.4 The sqlite3 package
    * 13.5 The wsgiref package

# 14 Build and C API Changes

    * 14.1 Port-Specific Changes

# 15 Porting to Python 2.5

Details in the What's new in 2.5 document: http://docs.python.org/dev/whatsnew/whatsnew25.html