Added a whole slew of news items. Not striving for completeness --
I've skipped all bugfixes, Unicode, distutils changes. But this
should be a start!
diff --git a/Misc/NEWS b/Misc/NEWS
index 284b774..08c1458 100644
--- a/Misc/NEWS
+++ b/Misc/NEWS
@@ -3,6 +3,36 @@
Core language, builtins, and interpreter
+- File objects have a new method, xreadlines(). This is the fastest
+ way to iterate over all lines in a file:
+
+ for line in file.xreadlines():
+ ...do something to line...
+
+ See the xreadlines module (mentioned below) for how to do this for
+ other file-like objects.
+
+- Even if you don't use file.xreadlines(), you may expect a speedup on
+ line-by-line input. The file.readline() method has been optimized
+ quite a bit in platform-specific ways, both on Windows (using an
+ incredibly complex, but nevertheless thread-safe), and on systems
+ (like Linux) that support flockfile(), getc_unlocked(), and
+ funlockfile(). In addition, the fileinput module, while still slow,
+ has been sped up too, by using file.readlines(sizehint).
+
+- Support for run-time warnings has been added, including a new
+ command line option (-W) to specify the disposition of warnings.
+ See the description of the warnings module below.
+
+- Extensive changes have been made to the coercion code. This mostly
+ affects extension modules (which can now implement mixed-type
+ numerical operators without having to use coercion), but
+ occasionally, in boundary cases the coercion semantics have changed
+ subtly. Since this was a terrible gray area of the language, this
+ is considered an improvement. Also not that __rcmp__ is no longer
+ supported -- instead of calling __rcmp__, __cmp__ is called with
+ reversed arguments.
+
- The interpreter accepts now bytecode files on the command line even
if they do not have a .pyc or .pyo extension. On Linux, after executing
@@ -42,9 +72,32 @@
item. Such algorithms normally end up running in quadratic time;
using popitem() they can usually be made to run in linear time.
-
Standard library
+- There's a new module, warnings, which implements a mechanism for
+ issuing and filtering warnings. There are some new built-in
+ exceptions that serve as warning categories, and a new command line
+ option, -W, to control warnings (e.g. -Wi ignores all warnings, -We
+ turns warnings into errors). warnings.warn(message[, category])
+ issues a warning message; this can also be called from C as
+ PyErr_Warn(category, message).
+
+- A new module xreadlines was added. This exports a single factory
+ function, xreadlines(). The intention is that this code is the
+ absolutely fastest way to iterate over all lines in an open
+ file(-like) object:
+
+ import xreadlines
+ for line in xreadlines.xreadlines(file):
+ ...do something to line...
+
+ This is equivalent to the previous the speed record holder using
+ file.readlines(sizehint). Note that if file is a real file object
+ (as opposed to a file-like object), this is equivalent:
+
+ for line in file.xreadlines():
+ ...do something to line...
+
- The bisect module has new functions bisect_left, insort_left,
bisect_right and insort_right. The old names bisect and insort
are now aliases for bisect_right and insort_right. XXX_right
@@ -54,6 +107,27 @@
right. Code that doesn't care where equal elements end up should
continue to use the old, short names ("bisect" and "insort").
+- The SocketServer module now sets the allow_reuse_address flag by
+ default in the TCPServer class.
+
+- A new function, sys._getframe(), returns the stack frame pointer of
+ the caller. This is intended only as a building block for
+ higher-level mechanisms such as string interpolation.
+
+Build issues
+
+- On Linux (and possibly other Unix platforms), the readline and
+ _curses modules are automatically configured through
+ Modules/Setup.config. These, and the bsddb module (which was
+ already dynamically configured) are now built as shared libraries by
+ default.
+
+- Python now always uses its own (renamed) implementation of getopt()
+ -- there's too much variation among C library getopt()
+ implementations.
+
+- C++ compilers are better supported; the CXX macro is always set to a
+ C++ compiler if one is found.
Windows changes
@@ -63,6 +137,9 @@
that, see the MS docs (you'll need to #define FD_SETSIZE
and recompile Python from source).
+- Support for Windows 3.1, DOS and OS/2 is gone. The Lib/dos-8x3
+ subdirectory is no more!
+
What's New in Python 2.0?
=========================