Fwd: RELEASED Python 2.3 (final)

[Robert Olson]

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>From: barry at python.org (Barry A. Warsaw)
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>Subject: RELEASED Python 2.3 (final)
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>Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 20:02:26 -0400
>
>
>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 at python.org
>Python 2.3 Release Manager
>(and the PythonLabs team: Tim, Fred, Jeremy, and Guido)
>
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