Here are some of the (subjective) highlights of Python 2.5. More detail onalmost all of the new features can be found in the documentWhat's New InPython 2.5

More Reliable

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

Andrew Kuchling determined that there were over 350 patches and over 450 bugsfixed 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, aswell as a number of other changes to improve performance.

New language features

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

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

Generators gained send, throw and close methods. Values passed to sendwill be returned by the yield statement when the generator is resumed.throw takes an exception and causes the yield statement to raise thepassed exception in the generator. close is used to terminate a generator.This turns generators into a form of coroutine and makes them even morepowerful.

Conditional expressions of the form (TrueValue if Condition else FalseValue)were added.

import can use both relative and absolute imports when inside packages.

Try/except/finally were changed so that it's now possible to have both exceptblocks and a finally block for the same try block.

Exceptions have become new-style classes, and the exception hierarchy hasbeen rearranged a bit.

Internally, Python was changed to use the Py_ssize_t type - this means thatmany structures that were limited to 2^32 objects can now hold up to 2^64instead.

New or upgraded built-ins

partition and rpartition methods were added to str and unicode. Thisgreatly simplifies the process of searching and splitting strings.

New builtins any and all evaluate whether an iterator contains any or allTrue values, respectively.

min and max gained a key keyword parameter, analogous to sort.

New or upgraded modules and packages

In keeping with the theme of adding tried and true packages to the standardlibrary, in 2.5 we've added ctypes, ElementTree, hashlib, sqlite3 and wsgirefto the standard library that ships with Python.

Google's summer of code resulted in a new cProfile profiling module. This is amuch more efficient version of the venerable profile.py module that's shippedwith Python for many many years. GSoC also gave us a rewritten mailbox modulethat can both read and write mailboxes in a variety of formats.

The struct module was updated to support a new Struct object. These are similarto the re module's compiled form of regular expressions.

Some other smaller modules added to the standard library include uuid, msiliband spwd.