16 February 2009, 11:31

Python 3.0.1 released

The first bug fix release of Python 3, 3.0.1 has arrived, and with it one change that missed the cull of deprecated methods. When Python 3.0 was released, one of the changes was the removal of the cmp() function, which compared two arguments and returned -1,1 or 0, depending on if the first argument was less than, greater than, or equal to, the second. However, the removal didn't happen in Python 3.0 and slipped through, which meant that there were programs which ran on Python 3.0, but still used cmp().

It turned out that removing cmp properly was a little harder than expected, as several standard libraries and tests were still using it. Now, with Python 3.0.1, cmp has been removed completely, and Python coders who have migrated to Python 3 will probably want to check their code with the new release to ensure they don't use cmp() either.

Python 3.0.1 also incorporates many other bug fixes, as detailed in the What's new in Python 3.0.1? notes. Python 3.0.1 can be downloaded from the Python.org web site.

See also: