A song for the lovers

Some news from the Python trunk:

• Server-side SSL support and certificate verification. See the doc.

• The functools module now provides reduce, for forward compatibility with Python 3000.

• Extended slicing support in builtin types and classes has been improved:

  • Specialcase extended slices that amount to a shallow copy the same way as is done for simple slices, in the tuple, string and unicode case.

  • Specialcase step-1 extended slices to optimize the common case for all involved types.

  • For lists, allow extended slice assignment of differing lengths as long as the step is 1. (previously, ‘l[:2:1] = []‘ failed even though ‘l[:2] = []‘ and ‘l[:2:None] = []‘ do not)

  • Implement extended slicing for buffer, array, structseq, mmap and UserString.UserString.

  • Implement slice-object support (but not non-step-1 slice assignment) for UserString.MutableString.

• socket.ssl deprecated; use new ssl module instead.

• httplib.FakeSocket is deprecated.