The twenty-second of the month was the fourth Thursday, the usual night for the Python Special Interest Group[1] to meet at the Amoskeag Business Incubator[2] in Manchester. Thirteen attendees made it to the January meeting.
As usual, coordinator Bill Sconce had a printed agenda with lots of news to go over. We had a round of introductions, though it was mostly a gathering of the regulars. We talked about Gotchas! -- those little surprises that pop up while working through the day -- and "reverse-gotchas!" -- the ah-ha moments that bring enlightenment. Kent Johnson presented his regular Kent's Korner presentation on context managers and the with statement[3]. Kent's notes for this and all past Kent's Korners can be found on his web site[4]. The with statement, long with decorators and generators (see how the KK sessions build upon each other!) can make a very powerful and very pythonic addition to writing python code. Arc Riley made the main presentation, on writing extensions in C. Arc was apparently one of the very first programmers to actually attempt to build an extension from scratch in Python 3.0, as he found that some of the key documentation was missing and some of the most important declaration about structures can only be found by reading the source code of Python itself. Arc documented his adventures for us, found a bug report to the Python folks[5], and provided the group with a very useful document of where the gotchas are, and some very useful bookmarks[6]. Thanks to Bill for organizing the meeting. Thanks to Janet for the cookies and Ray for bringing the milk! Thanks to the Amoskeag Business Incubator for the great facilities. And thanks to all for attending and participating! [1] http://www.pysig.org [2] http://www.abi-nh.com/ [3] http://personalpages.tds.net/~kent37/kk/00015.html [4] http://personalpages.tds.net/~kent37/kk/index.html [5] http://bugs.python.org/issue4614 [6] http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/PySIGArcRiley22Jan2009 -- Ted Roche Ted Roche & Associates, LLC http://www.tedroche.com _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/