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What's New in Python 2.7
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:Author: A.M. Kuchling (amk at amk.ca)

..  hyperlink all the methods & functions.

.. T_STRING_INPLACE not described in main docs

.. $Id$
   Rules for maintenance:

   * Anyone can add text to this document.  Do not spend very much time
   on the wording of your changes, because your text will probably
   get rewritten to some degree.

   * The maintainer will go through Misc/NEWS periodically and add
   changes; it's therefore more important to add your changes to
   Misc/NEWS than to this file.

   * This is not a complete list of every single change; completeness
   is the purpose of Misc/NEWS.  Some changes I consider too small
   or esoteric to include.  If such a change is added to the text,
   I'll just remove it.  (This is another reason you shouldn't spend
   too much time on writing your addition.)

   * If you want to draw your new text to the attention of the
   maintainer, add 'XXX' to the beginning of the paragraph or
   section.

   * It's OK to just add a fragmentary note about a change.  For
   example: "XXX Describe the transmogrify() function added to the
   socket module."  The maintainer will research the change and
   write the necessary text.

   * You can comment out your additions if you like, but it's not
   necessary (especially when a final release is some months away).

   * Credit the author of a patch or bugfix.  Just the name is
   sufficient; the e-mail address isn't necessary.

   * It's helpful to add the bug/patch number in a parenthetical comment.

   XXX Describe the transmogrify() function added to the socket
   module.
   (Contributed by P.Y. Developer; :issue:`12345`.)

   This saves the maintainer some effort going through the SVN logs
   when researching a change.

This article explains the new features in Python 2.7.  Python 2.7 was released
on July 3, 2010.

Numeric handling has been improved in many ways, for both
floating-point numbers and for the :class:`~decimal.Decimal` class.
There are some useful additions to the standard library, such as a
greatly enhanced :mod:`unittest` module, the :mod:`argparse` module
for parsing command-line options, convenient :class:`~collections.OrderedDict`
and :class:`~collections.Counter` classes in the :mod:`collections` module,
and many other improvements.

Python 2.7 is planned to be the last of the 2.x releases, so we worked
on making it a good release for the long term.  To help with porting
to Python 3, several new features from the Python 3.x series have been
included in 2.7.

This article doesn't attempt to provide a complete specification of
the new features, but instead provides a convenient overview.  For
full details, you should refer to the documentation for Python 2.7 at
https://docs.python.org. If you want to understand the rationale for
the design and implementation, refer to the PEP for a particular new
feature or the issue on https://bugs.python.org in which a change was
discussed.  Whenever possible, "What's New in Python" links to the
bug/patch item for each change.

.. toctree::
    :maxdepth: 2
    :numbered:
    :caption: Contents
    :name: whats_new

    part1
    part2
    part3
    part4
    part5
    part6
    part7
    part8
    part9
    part10
    part11
    part12
    part13
    part14
    part15
    part16