[Python-Dev] 1.5.2->1.6 Changes

[Moshe Zadka]

I'm starting to compile a list of changes from 1.5.2 to 1.6. Here's what I
came up with so far
-- string objects now have methods (though they are still immutable)
-- unicode support: Unicode strings are marked with u"string", and there
   is support for arbitrary encoders/decoders
-- "in" operator can now be overriden in user-defined classes to mean anything:
   it calls the magic method __contains__
-- SRE is the new regular expression engine. re.py became an interface to
   the same engine. The new engine fully supports unicode regular expressions.
-- Some methods which would take multiple arguments and treat them as a tuple
   were fixed: list.{append, insert, remove, count}, socket.connect
-- Some modules were made obsolete
-- filecmp.py (supersedes the old cmp.py and dircmp.py modules),
-- tabnanny.py (make sure the source file doesn't assume a specific tab-width)
-- win32reg (win32 registry editor)
-- unicode module, and codecs package
-- New calling syntax: f(*args, **kw) equivalent to apply(f, args, kw)
-- _tkinter now uses the object, rather then string, interface to Tcl.

Please e-mail me personally if you think of any other changes, and I'll 
try to integrate them into a complete "changes" document.

Thanks in advance
--
Moshe Zadka <mzadka@geocities.com>. 
http://www.oreilly.com/news/prescod_0300.html
http://www.linux.org.il -- we put the penguin in .com