RELEASED: Python 2.3b1 (fwd)

Robert Olson olson at mcs.anl.gov
Sat Apr 26 08:23:42 CDT 2003


Python 2.3 out in beta.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2003 20:12:41 -0400
From: Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org>
To: python-announce-list at python.org
Newsgroups: comp.lang.python.announce
Subject: RELEASED: Python 2.3b1

Python 2.3b1 is the first beta release of Python 2.3.  Much improved
since the last alpha, chockfull of things you'd like to check out:

  http://www.python.org/2.3/

Some highlights of what's new since 2.3a2:

- sum() builtin, adds a sequence of numbers, beats reduce().

- csv module, reads comma-separated-value files (and more).

- timeit module, times code snippets.

- os.walk(), a generator slated to replace os.path.walk().

- platform module, by Marc-Andre Lemburg, returns detailed platform
  information.

For more highlights, see http://www.python.org/2.3/highlights.html

New since Python 2.2:

- Many new and improved library modules, e.g. sets, heapq, datetime,
  textwrap, optparse, logging, bsddb, bz2, tarfile,
  ossaudiodev, and a new random number generator based on the highly
  acclaimed Mersenne Twister algorithm (with a period of 2**19937-1!).

- New builtin enumerate(): an iterator yielding (index, item) pairs.

- 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.

- Karatsuba long multiplication (running time O(N**1.58) instead of
  O(N**2)).

See also http://www.python.org/doc/2.3b1/whatsnew/ - Andrew Kuchling's
description of all important changes since 2.2.

We request widespread testing of this release but don't recommend
using it for production situations yet.  Beta releases contain bugs.
New APIs are expected to be stable, and may be changed only if serious
deficiencies are found.  No new APIs or modules will be added after
the first beta release.  If you have an important Python application,
we strongly recommend that you try it out with a beta release and
report any incompatibilities or other problems you may encounter, so
that they can be fixed before the final release.  To report problems,
use the SourceForge bug tracker:

  http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=5470&atid=105470

Enjoy!

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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