[Python-Dev] RELEASED: Python 2.3b2 (original) (raw)

Barry Warsaw barry@python.org
29 Jun 2003 21:57:43 -0400

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Python 2.3b2 is the second beta release of Python 2.3. There have be a slew of fixes since the first beta, and a few new "features". Our goal is to have a final Python 2.3 release by early August, so we encourage lots of testing for this beta. Highlights since beta 1 include:

• IDLEfork has been merged in and now replaces the old IDLE.

• The Windows installer now ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3.

• list.index() has grown optional start' and end' arguments.

• A new C-only API function PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc() which can be used to interrupt threads by sending them exceptions.

• Python programs can enter the interactive prompt at program exit by setting the PYTHONINSPECT environment variable.

• Many new doctest improvements, including the ability to write doctest based unit tests.

• New and improved documentation for writing new types in C that participate in cyclic garbage collection.

There is at least one known bug: we have seen crashes on both Windows and Linux with certain interactions between test_logging and test_bsddb3. We intend to fix this for the next release.

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

Other new stuff 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(N1.58) instead of O(N2)).

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, -Barry

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