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)