[Python-Dev] RELEASED Python 2.3c2

[Barry Warsaw]

Python 2.3c2 is the second and last release candidate for Python 2.3. 
There have been a bunch of bug fixes and memory leak plugs since the
first release candidate, but no new features.  As described in PEP 283,
Python 2.3 final will be released before the end of July 2003.  We are
planning for Tuesday 29-Jul-2003 if everything looks good.

We highly encourage everyone to rigorously test this release candidate. 
Only critical bug fixes will be allowed from here to the final release,
but we want this release to be as stable as possible.

Highlights since rc1 include:

- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
  data bytes before the zip compatible archive.  Zipfiles containing a
  comment at the end are still unsupported.

- Fixed leaks in pyexpat and locale, and a long standing bug in the
  parser module.

- The MacOSX build is now built with -mno-fused-madd to fix
  test_coercion on Panther (OSX 10.3).

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(N**1.58) instead of
  O(N**2)).

To report problems, use the SourceForge bug tracker:

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

brought-to-you-by-the-letter-'D'-for-drifty-ly y'rs,
-Barry