need to understand about the binary & decimal fp, so that representation
weirdness is documented somewhere. This makes it easier to repond to "bug"
reports caused by user confusion & ignorance of the issues.
This closes SF patch #426208.
numbers that display nicely after repr(). From much doctest experience
with the same trick, I believe people find examples with simple fractions
easier to understand too: they can usually check the results in their
head, and so feel confident about what they're seeing. Not even I get a
warm feeling from a result that looks like 70330.345024097141 ...
floating point numbers in an interactive example.
Added comment to help explain control flow in the example code showing
how to check if a number is prime.
This closes SF bugs 419434 and 424552.
Change "EOF" to "end-of-file", on the premise that it is easier for
new programmers to understand (at least a little).
This does not attempt to explain "file or device attached to standard
input."
hyperlink.
Fix two English usage errors caught by Jan Wells: Changed "subsequence"
to "sub-sequence" in two places, and avoid improper use of "hopefully" in
the first paragraph of the "What Now?" chapter.
Remove premature use of negative indexes in string operation examples;
negative indexes have not been explained at that point, and the use of
negative indexes are not necessary for the examples.
Fixed displays of the interactive prompt in running text.
These close SourceForge bug #115658.
Also:
Updated discussion of tuple unpacking to reflect the general ability
to unpack any sequence type. Explained that it is possible to create
tuples which contain mutable values, and noted in the dictionary
section that such tuples cannot be used as keys.
Noted that .pyc and .pyo files can be run directly when provided as
the script parameter to the interpreter, and slightly clarified
comments about using modules with only the byte compiled code.
Removed some XXX comments that are no longer relevant.
Removed commented-out paragraph about __private names being experimental.
Adjusted markup for consistency in some places.
<file>.readlines() does not call <file>.readline() internally anymore,
and the sizehint parameter should be mentioned briefly.
Some displays of floating point numbers needed to be updated due to the
change in the repr() of floats (from 1.6).
Both issues were noted by Aahz <aahz@panix.com>.
certain.
Update the information about the mailing list, using the python.org
address instead of cwi.nl, and point to the pipermail archives. Also
update the daily average message count (at the risk of scaring people
off), using the mail archive at http://www.egroups.com/group/python-list
for the first half of 2000 for statistical information.
distutils patches, which I'll leave to the distutils maintainers.
Tip: review the patch like this:
grep "^[\!+-] " <patchfile>
To get a quick and easy way to review the actual changes. Most of the
changes are single-line ones, anyway.
Barcla <danielb@digitalfocus.com>.
Also added example of what happens when a parameter is set both
positionally and by a keyword (one of Daniels suggestions related to
that paragraph).
