Python 2.3

By Jeremy Hylton, Cameron Laird, Alex Martelli

September 1, 2003

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Python 2.3, released at the end of July, offers a broad range of improvements to the popular, high-level programming language. It includes many enhancements to the standard library, a modest 25 percent speed boost, and hundreds of bugs fixes. There are no major changes to the language itself, just polish on what is already present.

The Python developer community focused on stability and performance for the 2.3 release, which comes eighteen months after the last major release. That update, Python 2.2, introduced major enhancements in the language. In particular, the object system was largely rewritten to introduce new-style classes. These changes improved the language, but it took time for Python programmers to learn and apply the new features productively. With the new 2.3 release, on the other hand, upgrading brings immediate advantages. There will be more rewards as the programmer learns and applies the standard-library enhancements, of course, but there are no deeper language-level changes to learn at all.

A Lot to Like

Developers and end users will find a lot to like in Python 2.3 and the growing crop of applications written in Python. With hundreds of bug fixes, the new version of Python is more robust, and complete on more platforms. Integration with platforms like Mac OS X and .NET continues to improve. End user applications like the Spambayes spam filter and Chandler, an experimental personal information manager, demonstrate Python's strength as an application programming language.

Python has earned a reputation among developers as an agile programming language. Powerful built-in data types such as strings, lists, and and dicts, support for object-oriented programming, and Python's strong but dynamic type system make for a potent language. But a Python release contains far more than just the core language: It includes a standard library with more than 200 modules and tools such as IDLE, an integrated development environment written in Python using the Tk GUI toolkit.

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