\item Built-in types now support the extended slicing syntax,
as described in section~\ref{section-slices} of this document.
+\item A new built-in function, \function{sum(\var{iterable}, \var{start}=0)},
+adds up the numeric items in the iterable object and returns their sum.
+\function{sum()} only accepts numbers, meaning that you can't use it
+to concatenate a bunch of strings, for example. (Contributed by Alex
+Martelli.)
+
\item Dictionaries have a new method, \method{pop(\var{key}\optional{,
\var{default}})}, that returns the value corresponding to \var{key}
and removes that key/value pair from the dictionary. If the requested
-key isn't present in the dictionary, \var{default} is returned if
-it's specified and \exception{KeyError} raised if it isn't.
+key isn't present in the dictionary, \var{default} is returned if it's
+specified and \exception{KeyError} raised if it isn't.
\begin{verbatim}
>>> d = {1:2}
them to override the settings in Python's configuration (contributed
by Robert Weber).
+\item The new \function{gc.get_referents(\var{object})} function returns a
+list of all the objects referenced by \var{object}.
+
\item The \module{getopt} module gained a new function,
\function{gnu_getopt()}, that supports the same arguments as the existing
\function{getopt()} function but uses GNU-style scanning mode.
tidied and brought up to date in various ways. (Contributed by Greg
Ward and Nicholas FitzRoy-Dale.)
+\item The new \module{platform} module contains a number of functions
+that try to determine various properties of the platform you're
+running on. There are functions for getting the architecture, CPU
+type, the Windows OS version, and even the Linux distribution version.
+(Contributed by Marc-Andr\'e Lemburg.)
+
\item The parser objects provided by the \module{pyexpat} module
can now optionally buffer character data, resulting in fewer calls to
your character data handler and therefore faster performance. Setting
(Sticking with Python 2.2 or 2.1 will not make your applications any
safer because there are known bugs in the \module{rexec} module in
-those versions. I repeat, if you're using \module{rexec}, stop using
+those versions. To repeat: if you're using \module{rexec}, stop using
it immediately.)
\item The \module{rotor} module has been deprecated because the