[Tutor] Fwd: RELEASED Python 2.3 (final)

[Todd Stephens]

,--------------- Forwarded message (begin)

 Subject: RELEASED Python 2.3 (final)
 From: Barry A. Warsaw <barry@python.org>
 Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 20:02:26 -0400
 Newsgroup: comp.lang.python.announce

 
 On behalf of the Python development team and the Python community, I'm
 happy to announce the release of Python 2.3 (final).
 
 Nineteen months in the making, Python 2.3 represents a commitment to
 stability and improved performance, with a minimum of new language
 features.  Countless bugs and memory leaks have been fixed, many new
 and updated modules have been added, and the new type/class system
 introduced in Python 2.2 has been significantly improved.  Python 2.3
 can be up to 30% faster than Python 2.2.
 
 For more information on Python 2.3, including download links for
 various platforms, release notes, and known issues, please see:
 
     http://www.python.org/2.3
 
 Highlights of this new release include:
 
 - A brand new version of IDLE, the Python IDE, from the IDLEfork
   project at SourceForge.
 
 - Many new and improved library modules including: sets, heapq,
   datetime, textwrap, optparse, logging, bsddb, bz2, tarfile,
   ossaudiodev, itertools, platform, csv, timeit, shelve,
   DocXMLRPCServer, imaplib, imp, trace, and a new random number
   generator based on the highly acclaimed Mersenne Twister algorithm
   (with a period of 2**19937-1).  Some obsolete modules have been
   deprecated.
 
 - New and improved built-ins including:
     o enumerate(): an iterator yielding (index, item) pairs
     o sum(): a new function to sum a sequence of numbers
     o basestring: an abstract base string type for str and unicode
     o bool: a proper type with instances True and False
     o compile(), eval(), exec: fully support Unicode, and allow input
       not ending in a newline
     o range(): support for long arguments (magnitude > sys.maxint)
     o dict(): new constructor signatures
     o filter(): returns Unicode when the input is Unicode
     o int() can now return long
     o isinstance(), super(): Now support instances whose type() is not
       equal to their __class__.  super() no longer ignores data
       descriptors, except for __class__.
     o raw_input(): can now return Unicode objects
     o slice(), buffer(): are now types rather than functions
 
 - Many new doctest extensions, allowing them to be run by unittest.
 
 - Extended slices, e.g. "hello"[::-1] returns "olleh".
 
 - Universal newlines mode for reading files (converts \r, \n and \r\n
   all into \n).
 
 - Source code encoding declarations.  (PEP 263)
 
 - Import from zip files.  (PEP 273 and PEP 302)
 
 - FutureWarning issued for "unsigned" operations on ints.  (PEP 237)
 
 - Faster list.sort() is now stable.
 
 - Unicode filenames on Windows.  (PEP 227)
 
 - Karatsuba long multiplication (running time O(N**1.58) instead of
   O(N**2)).
 
 - pickle, cPickle, and copy support a new pickling protocol for more
   efficient pickling of (especially) new-style class instances.
 
 - The socket module now supports optional timeouts on all operations.
 
 - ssl support has been incorporated into the Windows installer.
 
 - Many improvements to Tkinter.
 
 Python 2.3 contains many other improvements, including the adoption of
 many Python Enhancement Proposals (PEPs).  For details see:
 
     http://www.python.org/2.3/highlights.html
 
 Enjoy.
 
 happy-50th-birthday-geddy-ly y'rs,
 -Barry
 
 Barry Warsaw
 barry@python.org
 Python 2.3 Release Manager
 (and the PythonLabs team: Tim, Fred, Jeremy, and Guido)

`--------------- Forwarded message (end)

-- 
Todd Stephens