Python 2.2

Python is a programming language used in various applications, which provides a dynamic and powerful tool to the user. It is commonly used as a script language. It is similar to other programming languages such as Ruby, Java, Tcl, Perl or Scheme. But what sets it apart from most languages is its use of whitespace as block delimiters.

Python is distributed under the open source license, which makes it free to distribute and use. It also has an established community to help other python users; python's community organizes conferences all around the world, and even has a wiki web page to help new users with whatever they may bump into.

There are a number of new features included in the release of Python 2.2:
- There is now a class unification, which is a major innnovation - a new fashion of inspecting the instances of built-in types, both written in C and in Python, as those are unified into only one hierarchy.
- The integer overflow error has been removed - whenever there's a large integer outcome to a small integer operation, a long integer is now returned.
- A new windows installer has been developed.
- The standard library now includes Barry Warsaw's mimelib package
- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib has now been set as a standard library module.
- Support for large files has been added for Win32 and Win64 platforms, while it can be automatically configured on solaris and Linux OS's.

Tomas O'Rourke

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