On 29 November 2000, Tim Peters said:
[Guido]
... Because of its importance, the deprecation time of the string module will be longer than that of most deprecated modules. I expect it won't be removed until Python 3000.
I see nothing in the 2.0 docs, code, or "what's new" web pages saying that it's deprecated. So I don't think you can even start the clock on this one before 2.1 (a fuzzy stmt on the web page for the unused 1.6 release doesn't count ...).
FWIW, I would argue against *ever* removing (much less "deprecating", ie. threatening to remove) the string module. To a rough approximation, every piece of Python code in existence code prior to Python 1.6 depends on the string module. I for one do not want to have to change all occurences of string.foo(x) to x.foo() -- it just doesn't buy enough to make it worth changing all that code. Not only does the amount of code to change mean the change would be non-trivial, it's not always the right thing, especially if you happen to be one of the people who dislikes the "delim.join(list)" idiom. (I'm still undecided.) Greg