diff options
Diffstat (limited to 'Doc/whatsnew')
| -rw-r--r-- | Doc/whatsnew/whatsnew23.tex | 21 |
1 files changed, 18 insertions, 3 deletions
diff --git a/Doc/whatsnew/whatsnew23.tex b/Doc/whatsnew/whatsnew23.tex index fcb1a1d..52b500c 100644 --- a/Doc/whatsnew/whatsnew23.tex +++ b/Doc/whatsnew/whatsnew23.tex @@ -1085,11 +1085,17 @@ unlikely to cause problems in practice. \item Built-in types now support the extended slicing syntax, as described in section~\ref{section-slices} of this document. +\item A new built-in function, \function{sum(\var{iterable}, \var{start}=0)}, +adds up the numeric items in the iterable object and returns their sum. +\function{sum()} only accepts numbers, meaning that you can't use it +to concatenate a bunch of strings, for example. (Contributed by Alex +Martelli.) + \item Dictionaries have a new method, \method{pop(\var{key}\optional{, \var{default}})}, that returns the value corresponding to \var{key} and removes that key/value pair from the dictionary. If the requested -key isn't present in the dictionary, \var{default} is returned if -it's specified and \exception{KeyError} raised if it isn't. +key isn't present in the dictionary, \var{default} is returned if it's +specified and \exception{KeyError} raised if it isn't. \begin{verbatim} >>> d = {1:2} @@ -1397,6 +1403,9 @@ it now checks for the \envvar{CC}, \envvar{CFLAGS}, \envvar{CPP}, them to override the settings in Python's configuration (contributed by Robert Weber). +\item The new \function{gc.get_referents(\var{object})} function returns a +list of all the objects referenced by \var{object}. + \item The \module{getopt} module gained a new function, \function{gnu_getopt()}, that supports the same arguments as the existing \function{getopt()} function but uses GNU-style scanning mode. @@ -1524,6 +1533,12 @@ used on platforms other than Linux, and the interface has also been tidied and brought up to date in various ways. (Contributed by Greg Ward and Nicholas FitzRoy-Dale.) +\item The new \module{platform} module contains a number of functions +that try to determine various properties of the platform you're +running on. There are functions for getting the architecture, CPU +type, the Windows OS version, and even the Linux distribution version. +(Contributed by Marc-Andr\'e Lemburg.) + \item The parser objects provided by the \module{pyexpat} module can now optionally buffer character data, resulting in fewer calls to your character data handler and therefore faster performance. Setting @@ -1576,7 +1591,7 @@ use something else. (Sticking with Python 2.2 or 2.1 will not make your applications any safer because there are known bugs in the \module{rexec} module in -those versions. I repeat, if you're using \module{rexec}, stop using +those versions. To repeat: if you're using \module{rexec}, stop using it immediately.) \item The \module{rotor} module has been deprecated because the |