Python 2.2

Note: See Python 2.2.3 for a patch release which supersedes 2.2.

We are extremely pleased to announce the release of Python 2.2 (final), on December 21, 2001. Our thanks to everyone who has contributed to the Python 2.2 development cycle, our CVS committers, PEP authors, alpha and beta testers, bug and patch submitters, etc. You know who you are! :)

Please see the separate bugs page for known bugs in Python 2.2 final, and the bug reporting procedure.

Download the release

Windows users should download Python-2.2.exe, the Windows installer, from one of the download locations below, run it, and follow the friendly instructions on the screen to complete the installation. Windows users may also be interested in Mark Hammond's win32all, a collection of Windows-specific extensions including COM support and Pythonwin, an IDE built using Windows components.

Update (2002/04/23): Windows users should download a new UNWISE.EXE from Wise that fixes a bug which could cause the uninstaller to disappear in some circumstances. Just drop it over the old uninstaller, which will be at C:\Python22\UNWISE.EXE unless you chose a different directory at install time.

Macintosh users can find Python 2.2 prereleases on Jack Jansen's MacPython page (after following the link, scroll towards the bottom). This is sometimes one or two releases behind, so be patient. (MacOS X users who have a C compiler can also build from the source tarball below.)

All others should download Python-2.2.tgz, the source tarball, from one of the download locations below, and do the usual "gunzip; tar; configure; make" dance.

Download locations

• Python.org: HTTP. >

MD5 checksums and sizes

    568cf638ef5fc4edfdb4cc878d661129 Python-2.2.exe (7074248 bytes)
    87febf0780c8e18454022d34b2ca70a0 Python-2.2.tgz (6542443 bytes)
    9ae1d572cbd2bfd4e0c4b92ac11387c6 UNWISE.EXE (162304 bytes)

What's New?

Highlights

• Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1, generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.

• Type/Class Unification: A new way of introspecting instances of built-in types (PEP 252) and the ability to subclass built-in types (PEP 253) have been added. Here is a tutorial on these features.

• Iterators (PEP 234) and generators (PEP 255) were added. The second PEP adds a new reserved word, "yield", which must be enabled by adding "from __future__ import generators" to the top of every module that uses it. Without that, "yield" is treated as an identifier but a warning is issued.

• The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in which case the / operator will provide true division.

• Integer overflow is now a thing of the past; when small integer operations have a result that's too large to represent as a small integer, a long integer is now returned. See PEP 237.

• Barry Warsaw's mimelib package is now part of the standard library. It has been renamed to the email package, and there have been some API changes.

• Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This provides full client-side XML-RPC support. A server class is also provided (module SimpleXMLRPCServer).

• Large file support is now enabled on Win32 and Win64 platforms, and automatically configured (at least on Linux and Solaris).

Other sources of information on 2.2

• Unifying types and classes in Python 2.2 by Guido van Rossum -- a tutorial on the material covered by PEPs 252 and 253.

• What's New in Python 2.2 by Andrew Kuchling describes the most visible changes since Python 2.1.

• Guido gave a talk on what's new in 2.2 at the ZPUG-DC meeting on September 26, 2001; here are his powerpoint slides.

• Charming Python: Iterators and simple generators by David Mertz on IBM developerWorks.

• For a detailed list of all but the most trivial changes, see the release notes.

• In the source distribution, the file Misc/NEWS has all the news.

Documentation

The documentation has been updated too:

• Browse HTML on-line
• Download using HTTP.