Until Python 2.5, the \keyword{try} statement came in two
flavours. You could use a \keyword{finally} block to ensure that code
-is always executed, or a number of \keyword{except} blocks to catch an
-exception. You couldn't combine both \keyword{except} blocks and a
+is always executed, or one or more \keyword{except} blocks to catch
+specific exceptions. You couldn't combine both \keyword{except} blocks and a
\keyword{finally} block, because generating the right bytecode for the
combined version was complicated and it wasn't clear what the
semantics of the combined should be.
%======================================================================
\section{New, Improved, and Deprecated Modules}
-As usual, Python's standard library received a number of enhancements and
+As usual, Python's standard library received many enhancements and
bug fixes. Here's a partial list of the most notable changes, sorted
alphabetically by module name. Consult the
\file{Misc/NEWS} file in the source tree for a more
(Contributed by Raymond Hettinger.)
-\item The \module{os} module underwent a number of changes. The
+\item The \module{os} module underwent several changes. The
\member{stat_float_times} variable now defaults to true, meaning that
\function{os.stat()} will now return time values as floats. (This
doesn't necessarily mean that \function{os.stat()} will return times
Peters.)
Note that this change means extension modules need to be more careful
-with how they allocate memory. Python's API has a number of different
+with how they allocate memory. Python's API has many different
functions for allocating memory that are grouped into families. For
example, \cfunction{PyMem_Malloc()}, \cfunction{PyMem_Realloc()}, and
\cfunction{PyMem_Free()} are one family that allocates raw memory,
\item Coverity, a company that markets a source code analysis tool
called Prevent, provided the results of their examination of the Python
- source code. The analysis found a number of refcounting bugs, often
- in error-handling code. These bugs have been fixed.
- % XXX provide reference?
+ source code. The analysis found about 60 bugs that
+ were quickly fixed. Many of the bugs were refcounting problems, often
+ occurring in error-handling code. See
+ \url{http://scan.coverity.com} for the statistics.
\end{itemize}