Shed Skin 0.0.5.9

I have just released Shed Skin 0.0.5.9. It's almost where I want it to be
for 0.0.6. What remains to be coded is some kind of connection to the
standard library (probably a simple one at first: working only for
'opaque handlers'). I also want to improve cases where ints and floats
are mixed, since this is quite common. Some major changes:

-basic exception handling

(support for custom ones, and for some builtins such as ValueError,
KeyError and AssertionError; this will allow for implementation of
iterator objects later on)

-some basic inheritance

(no multiple inheritance yet, or weird stuff; this enabled me to add
the 340-line pygmy raytracer to the test set. it becomes about 40
times faster here..)

-keyword arguments

(this has not been tested very well yet - let me know about any problems)

-many missing minor 'set' features, thanks to reports by bearophile

(it should be practically complete now. the whole set of builtins is
nearing completion :D time to start optimizing stuff..)

-many, many bugfixes again, again mostly thanks to bearophile

I added four new 'big' programs to the test set that (with some minor
modifications) work now: a tic-tac-toe player for arbitrary size
boards, a simple genetics algorithm, a linear algebra program and the
mentioned raytracer. Finally, the README has been improved again,
though it's still pretty bad. After the release of 0.0.6 I plan to
create a web site with performance comparisons between CPython, Psyco
and Shed Skin (perhaps even PyPy :P), because quite some interesting
programs compile now, and Shed Skin is usually a lot faster than Psyco, except when Python builtins are the bottleneck. I guess some more STL magic is required here..

Let the small code fragments that fail flowing!

Shed Skin 0.0.6 Status Update

Just a small note to anyone interested, that I am hard at work to get Shed Skin version 0.0.6 ready before the end of the year. It already supports an almost unmodified OO raytracer of about 350 lines (pygmy, with a speedup of about 40 on this sempron 2200+), as well as some other larger new programs. Simple inheritance has been improved by a lot. I am currently working on exception handling, which will probably be supported well in 0.0.6. Thanks to bearophile, a huge amount of bugs have additionally been
fixed. I will probably release a 0.0.5.8 or 9 within the coming week.

Please let me know if you have interesting use cases of inheritance and/or exceptions, and I would be glad to look into any problems. In that case, please ask me for the latest version of the compiler first (I have no access to CVS currently.)

Btw, I will probably be working on some method of accessing much not too weird standard library functionality soon, but I'm not sure whether I will manage to get this working well before 0.0.6.