12.5 Library Changes

• There are new module ni and ihooks that support importing modules with hierarchical names such as A.B.C. This is enabled by writing import ni; ni.ni() at the very top of the main program. These modules are amply documented in the Python source.
• The module rexec has been rewritten (incompatibly) to define a class and to use ihooks.
• The string.split() and string.splitfields() functions are now the same function (the presence or absence of the second argument determines which operation is invoked); similar for string.join() and string.joinfields().
• The Tkinter module and its helper Dialog have been revamped to use keyword arguments. Tk 4.0 is now the standard. A new module FileDialog has been added which implements standard file selection dialogs.
• The optional built-in modules dbm and gdbm are more coordinated -- their open() functions now take the same values for their flag argument, and the flag and mode argument have default values (to open the database for reading only, and to create the database with mode 0666 minuse the umask, respectively). The memory leaks have finally been fixed.
• A new dbm-like module, bsddb, has been added, which uses the BSD DB package's hash method.
• A portable (though slow) dbm-clone, implemented in Python, has been added for systems where none of the above is provided. It is aptly dubbed dumbdbm.
• The module anydbm provides a unified interface to bsddb, gdbm, dbm, and dumbdbm, choosing the first one available.
• A new extension module, binascii, provides a variety of operations for conversion of text-encoded binary data.
• There are three new or rewritten companion modules implemented in Python that can encode and decode the most common such formats: uu (uuencode), base64 and binhex.
• A module to handle the MIME encoding quoted-printable has also been added: quopri.
• The parser module (which provides an interface to the Python parser's abstract syntax trees) has been rewritten (incompatibly) by Fred Drake. It now lets you change the parse tree and compile the result!
• The syslog module has been upgraded and documented.