sys includes features for trapping and working with exceptions. Read more at pymotw.com:

sys includes several functions for understanding and controlling memory usage. Read more at pymotw.com: sys

sys provides low-level APIs for interacting with the system outside of your application, by accepting command line arguments, accessing user input, and passing messages and status values to the user. Read more at pymotw.com: sys

sys contains attributes and functions for accessing compile-time or runtime configuration settings for the interpreter. Read more at pymotw.com: sys

Dear LazyWeb, I need help compiling a list of Python modules that exist outside of the standard library and either duplicate or serve as replacements for modules that are in the standard library. For example, simplejson became the standard library module json but is also maintained separately for backwards compatibility and to include the optional C extension that is not part of the standard library version (please correct me if I’m wrong).

GHOP planning is under way. The first step, as before, is to come up with the list of tasks that would let junior high and high school students contribute to Python. We had good success last time with documentation-related tasks, such as writing examples, proofreading, or updating the standard library docs. This year Titus had the bright idea to run a survey to see what the community felt needed work.

The functions in resource help you probe the current resources consumed by a process, and place limits on them to control how much load your program places on a system. Read more at pymotw.com: resource

For the past few weeks I’ve been wrapped up reading Steven Weber’s The Success of Open Source. Published in 2004, it is a look at what the open source movement is and how it works, from the perspective of a political scientist. This is no trite look at why people would choose to give away the fruits of their labor. His analysis is serious and well considered. He stresses several times that his goal is to ask questions rather than answer them, but he does offer some observations about the open source movement as a larger social movement and how it might spread to other parts of the culture.

The fractions module implements a class for working with rational numbers. The Fraction class supports numerical operations for rational numbers based on the API defined by Rational in numbers. Read more at pymotw.com: fractions

In order to better meet the needs of partners, Racemi needed to build a private web service to facilitate tighter integration between our applications and theirs. After researching the state of SOAP development in Python, we were able to find a set of tools that met our needs quite well. In this article, we will describe the criteria we used to evaluate the available tools and the process we followed to decide which library was right for us.