New Features in Python 1.6

[Jason Stokes]

Guido van Rossum wrote in message
<200004011740.MAA04675 at eric.cnri.reston.va.us>...

>Complementary to the Distutils are the Imputils, or Import Utilities.
>Python's import mechanism has been reworked to make it easy for Python
>programmers to put "hooks" into the code that finds and loads modules.
>The default import mechanism now includes hooks, written in Python, to
>load modules via HTTP from a known URL.
>
>This has allowed us to drop most of the standard library from the
>distribution.  Now, for example, when you import a less-commonly-needed
>module from the standard library, Python fetches the code for you.  For
>example, if you say
>
>    import tokenize
>
>then Python -- via the Imputils -- will fetch
>http://modules.python.org/lib/tokenize.py for you and install it on your
>system for future use.  (This is why the Python interpreter is now
>installed as a setuid binary under Unix -- if you turn off this bit, you
>will be unable to load modules from the standard library!)


This is the only item silly enough to prove conclusively that we have an
April Fool's joke!  The problem with all these items is that they are all
just too plausible.  Double quote for unicode, single quote for ASCII -- I
can just imagine someone coming up with that!  Likewise the bizarre string
mutability semantics, and the self correcting "split" method that decides
which string is the split method by looking at which one occurs most
frequently inside the other!