Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1 | What's New in Python 2.1 alpha 1? |
| 2 | ================================= |
| 3 | |
| 4 | Core language, builtins, and interpreter |
| 5 | |
Guido van Rossum | 1cc8f83 | 2001-01-12 16:25:08 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 6 | - Two changes to from...import: |
| 7 | |
| 8 | 1) "from M import X" now works even if M is not a real module; it's |
| 9 | basically a getattr() operation with AttributeError exceptions |
| 10 | changed into ImportError. |
| 11 | |
| 12 | 2) "from M import *" now looks for M.__all__ to decide which names to |
| 13 | import; if M.__all__ doesn't exist, it uses M.__dict__.keys() but |
| 14 | filters out names starting with '_' as before. Whether or not |
| 15 | __all__ exists, there's no restriction on the type of M. |
| 16 | |
Guido van Rossum | f61f166 | 2001-01-10 20:13:55 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 17 | - File objects have a new method, xreadlines(). This is the fastest |
| 18 | way to iterate over all lines in a file: |
| 19 | |
| 20 | for line in file.xreadlines(): |
| 21 | ...do something to line... |
| 22 | |
| 23 | See the xreadlines module (mentioned below) for how to do this for |
| 24 | other file-like objects. |
| 25 | |
| 26 | - Even if you don't use file.xreadlines(), you may expect a speedup on |
| 27 | line-by-line input. The file.readline() method has been optimized |
Tim Peters | f29b64d | 2001-01-15 06:33:19 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 28 | quite a bit in platform-specific ways: on systems (like Linux) that |
| 29 | support flockfile(), getc_unlocked(), and funlockfile(), those are |
| 30 | used by default. On systems (like Windows) without getc_unlocked(), |
| 31 | a complicated (but still thread-safe) method using fgets() is used by |
| 32 | default. |
| 33 | |
| 34 | You can force use of the fgets() method by #define'ing |
| 35 | USE_FGETS_IN_GETLINE at build time (it may be faster than |
| 36 | getc_unlocked()). |
| 37 | |
| 38 | You can force fgets() not to be used by #define'ing |
| 39 | DONT_USE_FGETS_IN_GETLINE (this is the first thing to try if std test |
| 40 | test_bufio.py fails -- and let us know if it does!). |
| 41 | |
| 42 | - In addition, the fileinput module, while still slower than the other |
| 43 | methods on most platforms, has been sped up too, by using |
| 44 | file.readlines(sizehint). |
Guido van Rossum | f61f166 | 2001-01-10 20:13:55 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 45 | |
| 46 | - Support for run-time warnings has been added, including a new |
| 47 | command line option (-W) to specify the disposition of warnings. |
| 48 | See the description of the warnings module below. |
| 49 | |
| 50 | - Extensive changes have been made to the coercion code. This mostly |
| 51 | affects extension modules (which can now implement mixed-type |
| 52 | numerical operators without having to use coercion), but |
| 53 | occasionally, in boundary cases the coercion semantics have changed |
| 54 | subtly. Since this was a terrible gray area of the language, this |
Guido van Rossum | ae72d87 | 2001-01-11 15:00:14 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 55 | is considered an improvement. Also note that __rcmp__ is no longer |
Guido van Rossum | f61f166 | 2001-01-10 20:13:55 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 56 | supported -- instead of calling __rcmp__, __cmp__ is called with |
| 57 | reversed arguments. |
| 58 | |
Martin v. Löwis | be4c0f5 | 2001-01-04 20:30:56 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 59 | - The interpreter accepts now bytecode files on the command line even |
| 60 | if they do not have a .pyc or .pyo extension. On Linux, after executing |
| 61 | |
| 62 | echo ':pyc:M::\x87\xc6\x0d\x0a::/usr/local/bin/python:' > /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register |
| 63 | |
| 64 | any byte code file can be used as an executable (i.e. as an argument |
| 65 | to execve(2)). |
| 66 | |
Tim Peters | 9940b80 | 2000-12-01 07:59:35 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 67 | - %[xXo] formats of negative Python longs now produce a sign |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 68 | character. In 1.6 and earlier, they never produced a sign, |
| 69 | and raised an error if the value of the long was too large |
| 70 | to fit in a Python int. In 2.0, they produced a sign if and |
| 71 | only if too large to fit in an int. This was inconsistent |
| 72 | across platforms (because the size of an int varies across |
| 73 | platforms), and inconsistent with hex() and oct(). Example: |
| 74 | |
| 75 | >>> "%x" % -0x42L |
Tim Peters | 9940b80 | 2000-12-01 07:59:35 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 76 | '-42' # in 2.1 |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 77 | 'ffffffbe' # in 2.0 and before, on 32-bit machines |
| 78 | >>> hex(-0x42L) |
| 79 | '-0x42L' # in all versions of Python |
| 80 | |
Tim Peters | 9940b80 | 2000-12-01 07:59:35 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 81 | The behavior of %d formats for negative Python longs remains |
| 82 | the same as in 2.0 (although in 1.6 and before, they raised |
| 83 | an error if the long didn't fit in a Python int). |
| 84 | |
| 85 | %u formats don't make sense for Python longs, but are allowed |
| 86 | and treated the same as %d in 2.1. In 2.0, a negative long |
| 87 | formatted via %u produced a sign if and only if too large to |
| 88 | fit in an int. In 1.6 and earlier, a negative long formatted |
| 89 | via %u raised an error if it was too big to fit in an int. |
| 90 | |
Guido van Rossum | 3661d39 | 2000-12-12 22:10:31 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 91 | - Dictionary objects have an odd new method, popitem(). This removes |
| 92 | an arbitrary item from the dictionary and returns it (in the form of |
| 93 | a (key, value) pair). This can be useful for algorithms that use a |
| 94 | dictionary as a bag of "to do" items and repeatedly need to pick one |
| 95 | item. Such algorithms normally end up running in quadratic time; |
| 96 | using popitem() they can usually be made to run in linear time. |
| 97 | |
Tim Peters | 36cdad1 | 2000-12-29 02:06:45 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 98 | Standard library |
| 99 | |
Guido van Rossum | da91f22 | 2001-01-15 16:36:08 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 100 | - The ftplib module now defaults to passive mode, which is deemed a |
| 101 | more useful default given that clients are often inside firewalls |
| 102 | these days. Note that this could break if ftplib is used to connect |
| 103 | to a *server* that is inside a firewall, from outside; this is |
| 104 | expected to be a very rare situation. To fix that, you can call |
| 105 | ftp.set_pasv(0). |
| 106 | |
Martin v. Löwis | 10a2787 | 2001-01-13 09:54:41 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 107 | - The module site now treats .pth files not only for path configuration, |
| 108 | but also supports extensions to the initialization code: Lines starting |
| 109 | with import are executed. |
| 110 | |
Guido van Rossum | f61f166 | 2001-01-10 20:13:55 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 111 | - There's a new module, warnings, which implements a mechanism for |
| 112 | issuing and filtering warnings. There are some new built-in |
| 113 | exceptions that serve as warning categories, and a new command line |
| 114 | option, -W, to control warnings (e.g. -Wi ignores all warnings, -We |
| 115 | turns warnings into errors). warnings.warn(message[, category]) |
| 116 | issues a warning message; this can also be called from C as |
| 117 | PyErr_Warn(category, message). |
| 118 | |
| 119 | - A new module xreadlines was added. This exports a single factory |
| 120 | function, xreadlines(). The intention is that this code is the |
| 121 | absolutely fastest way to iterate over all lines in an open |
| 122 | file(-like) object: |
| 123 | |
| 124 | import xreadlines |
| 125 | for line in xreadlines.xreadlines(file): |
| 126 | ...do something to line... |
| 127 | |
| 128 | This is equivalent to the previous the speed record holder using |
| 129 | file.readlines(sizehint). Note that if file is a real file object |
| 130 | (as opposed to a file-like object), this is equivalent: |
| 131 | |
| 132 | for line in file.xreadlines(): |
| 133 | ...do something to line... |
| 134 | |
Tim Peters | 36cdad1 | 2000-12-29 02:06:45 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 135 | - The bisect module has new functions bisect_left, insort_left, |
| 136 | bisect_right and insort_right. The old names bisect and insort |
| 137 | are now aliases for bisect_right and insort_right. XXX_right |
| 138 | and XXX_left methods differ in what happens when the new element |
| 139 | compares equal to one or more elements already in the list: the |
| 140 | XXX_left methods insert to the left, the XXX_right methods to the |
Tim Peters | 742bb6f | 2001-01-05 08:05:32 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 141 | right. Code that doesn't care where equal elements end up should |
| 142 | continue to use the old, short names ("bisect" and "insort"). |
Tim Peters | 36cdad1 | 2000-12-29 02:06:45 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 143 | |
Andrew M. Kuchling | f6f3a89 | 2001-01-13 14:53:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 144 | - The new curses.panel module wraps the panel library that forms part |
| 145 | of SYSV curses and ncurses. Contributed by Thomas Gellekum. |
| 146 | |
Guido van Rossum | f61f166 | 2001-01-10 20:13:55 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 147 | - The SocketServer module now sets the allow_reuse_address flag by |
| 148 | default in the TCPServer class. |
| 149 | |
| 150 | - A new function, sys._getframe(), returns the stack frame pointer of |
| 151 | the caller. This is intended only as a building block for |
| 152 | higher-level mechanisms such as string interpolation. |
| 153 | |
| 154 | Build issues |
| 155 | |
| 156 | - On Linux (and possibly other Unix platforms), the readline and |
| 157 | _curses modules are automatically configured through |
| 158 | Modules/Setup.config. These, and the bsddb module (which was |
| 159 | already dynamically configured) are now built as shared libraries by |
| 160 | default. |
| 161 | |
| 162 | - Python now always uses its own (renamed) implementation of getopt() |
| 163 | -- there's too much variation among C library getopt() |
| 164 | implementations. |
| 165 | |
| 166 | - C++ compilers are better supported; the CXX macro is always set to a |
| 167 | C++ compiler if one is found. |
Tim Peters | 36cdad1 | 2000-12-29 02:06:45 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 168 | |
Tim Peters | d92dfe0 | 2000-12-12 01:18:41 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 169 | Windows changes |
| 170 | |
| 171 | - select module: By default under Windows, a select() call |
| 172 | can specify no more than 64 sockets. Python now boosts |
| 173 | this Microsoft default to 512. If you need even more than |
| 174 | that, see the MS docs (you'll need to #define FD_SETSIZE |
| 175 | and recompile Python from source). |
| 176 | |
Guido van Rossum | f61f166 | 2001-01-10 20:13:55 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 177 | - Support for Windows 3.1, DOS and OS/2 is gone. The Lib/dos-8x3 |
| 178 | subdirectory is no more! |
| 179 | |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 180 | |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 181 | What's New in Python 2.0? |
Fred Drake | 1a64050 | 2000-10-16 20:27:25 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 182 | ========================= |
Guido van Rossum | 6100033 | 1997-08-15 04:39:58 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 183 | |
Guido van Rossum | 8ed602b | 2000-09-01 22:34:33 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 184 | Below is a list of all relevant changes since release 1.6. Older |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 185 | changes are in the file HISTORY. If you are making the jump directly |
| 186 | from Python 1.5.2 to 2.0, make sure to read the section for 1.6 in the |
| 187 | HISTORY file! Many important changes listed there. |
Guido van Rossum | 6100033 | 1997-08-15 04:39:58 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 188 | |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 189 | Alternatively, a good overview of the changes between 1.5.2 and 2.0 is |
| 190 | the document "What's New in Python 2.0" by Kuchling and Moshe Zadka: |
| 191 | http://starship.python.net/crew/amk/python/writing/new-python/. |
Guido van Rossum | 1f83cce | 1997-10-06 21:04:35 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 192 | |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 193 | --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.pythonlabs.com/~guido/) |
Guido van Rossum | 437cfe8 | 1999-04-08 20:17:57 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 194 | |
| 195 | ====================================================================== |
| 196 | |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 197 | What's new in 2.0 (since release candidate 1)? |
| 198 | ============================================== |
| 199 | |
| 200 | Standard library |
| 201 | |
| 202 | - The copy_reg module was modified to clarify its intended use: to |
| 203 | register pickle support for extension types, not for classes. |
| 204 | pickle() will raise a TypeError if it is passed a class. |
| 205 | |
| 206 | - Fixed a bug in gettext's "normalize and expand" code that prevented |
| 207 | it from finding an existing .mo file. |
| 208 | |
| 209 | - Restored support for HTTP/0.9 servers in httplib. |
| 210 | |
Tim Peters | 989b7b9 | 2000-10-16 20:24:53 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 211 | - The math module was changed to stop raising OverflowError in case of |
| 212 | underflow, and return 0 instead in underflow cases. Whether Python |
| 213 | used to raise OverflowError in case of underflow was platform- |
| 214 | dependent (it did when the platform math library set errno to ERANGE |
| 215 | on underflow). |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 216 | |
| 217 | - Fixed a bug in StringIO that occurred when the file position was not |
| 218 | at the end of the file and write() was called with enough data to |
| 219 | extend past the end of the file. |
| 220 | |
| 221 | - Fixed a bug that caused Tkinter error messages to get lost on |
| 222 | Windows. The bug was fixed by replacing direct use of |
| 223 | interp->result with Tcl_GetStringResult(interp). |
| 224 | |
| 225 | - Fixed bug in urllib2 that caused it to fail when it received an HTTP |
| 226 | redirect response. |
| 227 | |
| 228 | - Several changes were made to distutils: Some debugging code was |
| 229 | removed from util. Fixed the installer used when an external zip |
| 230 | program (like WinZip) is not found; the source code for this |
| 231 | installer is in Misc/distutils. check_lib() was modified to behave |
| 232 | more like AC_CHECK_LIB by add other_libraries() as a parameter. The |
| 233 | test for whether installed modules are on sys.path was changed to |
| 234 | use both normcase() and normpath(). |
| 235 | |
Jeremy Hylton | d867a2c | 2000-10-16 20:41:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 236 | - Several minor bugs were fixed in the xml package (the minidom, |
| 237 | pulldom, expatreader, and saxutils modules). |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 238 | |
| 239 | - The regression test driver (regrtest.py) behavior when invoked with |
| 240 | -l changed: It now reports a count of objects that are recognized as |
| 241 | garbage but not freed by the garbage collector. |
| 242 | |
Tim Peters | 989b7b9 | 2000-10-16 20:24:53 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 243 | - The regression test for the math module was changed to test |
| 244 | exceptional behavior when the test is run in verbose mode. Python |
| 245 | cannot yet guarantee consistent exception behavior across platforms, |
| 246 | so the exception part of test_math is run only in verbose mode, and |
| 247 | may fail on your platform. |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 248 | |
| 249 | Internals |
| 250 | |
| 251 | - PyOS_CheckStack() has been disabled on Win64, where it caused |
| 252 | test_sre to fail. |
| 253 | |
| 254 | Build issues |
| 255 | |
| 256 | - Changed compiler flags, so that gcc is always invoked with -Wall and |
| 257 | -Wstrict-prototypes. Users compiling Python with GCC should see |
| 258 | exactly one warning, except if they have passed configure the |
Tim Peters | 989b7b9 | 2000-10-16 20:24:53 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 259 | --with-pydebug flag. The expected warning is for getopt() in |
Tim Peters | adfb94f | 2000-10-16 20:51:33 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 260 | Modules/main.c. This warning will be fixed for Python 2.1. |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 261 | |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 262 | - Fixed configure to add -threads argument during linking on OSF1. |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 263 | |
| 264 | Tools and other miscellany |
| 265 | |
| 266 | - The compiler in Tools/compiler was updated to support the new |
| 267 | language features introduced in 2.0: extended print statement, list |
| 268 | comprehensions, and augmented assignments. The new compiler should |
| 269 | also be backwards compatible with Python 1.5.2; the compiler will |
| 270 | always generate code for the version of the interpreter it runs |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 271 | under. |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 272 | |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 273 | What's new in 2.0 release candidate 1 (since beta 2)? |
| 274 | ===================================================== |
| 275 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 6040aaa | 2000-10-09 21:27:22 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 276 | What is release candidate 1? |
| 277 | |
| 278 | We believe that release candidate 1 will fix all known bugs that we |
| 279 | intend to fix for the 2.0 final release. This release should be a bit |
| 280 | more stable than the previous betas. We would like to see even more |
| 281 | widespread testing before the final release, so we are producing this |
| 282 | release candidate. The final release will be exactly the same unless |
| 283 | any show-stopping (or brown bag) bugs are found by testers of the |
| 284 | release candidate. |
| 285 | |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 286 | All the changes since the last beta release are bug fixes or changes |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 287 | to support building Python for specific platforms. |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 288 | |
| 289 | Core language, builtins, and interpreter |
| 290 | |
| 291 | - A bug that caused crashes when __coerce__ was used with augmented |
| 292 | assignment, e.g. +=, was fixed. |
| 293 | |
| 294 | - Raise ZeroDivisionError when raising zero to a negative number, |
| 295 | e.g. 0.0 ** -2.0. Note that math.pow is unrelated to the builtin |
| 296 | power operator and the result of math.pow(0.0, -2.0) will vary by |
| 297 | platform. On Linux, it raises a ValueError. |
| 298 | |
| 299 | - A bug in Unicode string interpolation was fixed that occasionally |
| 300 | caused errors with formats including "%%". For example, the |
| 301 | following expression "%% %s" % u"abc" no longer raises a TypeError. |
| 302 | |
| 303 | - Compilation of deeply nested expressions raises MemoryError instead |
| 304 | of SyntaxError, e.g. eval("[" * 50 + "]" * 50). |
| 305 | |
| 306 | - In 2.0b2 on Windows, the interpreter wrote .pyc files in text mode, |
| 307 | rendering them useless. They are now written in binary mode again. |
| 308 | |
| 309 | Standard library |
| 310 | |
| 311 | - Keyword arguments are now accepted for most pattern and match object |
| 312 | methods in SRE, the standard regular expression engine. |
| 313 | |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 314 | - In SRE, fixed error with negative lookahead and lookbehind that |
Jeremy Hylton | 32e20ff | 2000-10-09 19:48:11 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 315 | manifested itself as a runtime error in patterns like "(?<!abc)(def)". |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 316 | |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 317 | - Several bugs in the Unicode handling and error handling in _tkinter |
| 318 | were fixed. |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 319 | |
| 320 | - Fix memory management errors in Merge() and Tkapp_Call() routines. |
| 321 | |
| 322 | - Several changes were made to cStringIO to make it compatible with |
| 323 | the file-like object interface and with StringIO. If operations are |
| 324 | performed on a closed object, an exception is raised. The truncate |
| 325 | method now accepts a position argument and readline accepts a size |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 326 | argument. |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 327 | |
| 328 | - There were many changes made to the linuxaudiodev module and its |
| 329 | test suite; as a result, a short, unexpected audio sample should now |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 330 | play when the regression test is run. |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 331 | |
| 332 | Note that this module is named poorly, because it should work |
| 333 | correctly on any platform that supports the Open Sound System |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 334 | (OSS). |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 335 | |
| 336 | The module now raises exceptions when errors occur instead of |
| 337 | crashing. It also defines the AFMT_A_LAW format (logarithmic A-law |
| 338 | audio) and defines a getptr() method that calls the |
| 339 | SNDCTL_DSP_GETxPTR ioctl defined in the OSS Programmer's Guide. |
| 340 | |
| 341 | - The library_version attribute, introduced in an earlier beta, was |
| 342 | removed because it can not be supported with early versions of the C |
| 343 | readline library, which provides no way to determine the version at |
| 344 | compile-time. |
| 345 | |
| 346 | - The binascii module is now enabled on Win64. |
| 347 | |
Tim Peters | 46446d6 | 2000-10-09 21:19:31 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 348 | - tokenize.py no longer suffers "recursion depth" errors when parsing |
| 349 | programs with very long string literals. |
| 350 | |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 351 | Internals |
| 352 | |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 353 | - Fixed several buffer overflow vulnerabilities in calculate_path(), |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 354 | which is called when the interpreter starts up to determine where |
| 355 | the standard library is installed. These vulnerabilities affect all |
| 356 | previous versions of Python and can be exploited by setting very |
| 357 | long values for PYTHONHOME or argv[0]. The risk is greatest for a |
| 358 | setuid Python script, although use of the wrapper in |
| 359 | Misc/setuid-prog.c will eliminate the vulnerability. |
| 360 | |
| 361 | - Fixed garbage collection bugs in instance creation that were |
| 362 | triggered when errors occurred during initialization. The solution, |
| 363 | applied in cPickle and in PyInstance_New(), is to call |
| 364 | PyObject_GC_Init() after the initialization of the object's |
| 365 | container attributes is complete. |
| 366 | |
| 367 | - pyexpat adds definitions of PyModule_AddStringConstant and |
| 368 | PyModule_AddObject if the Python version is less than 2.0, which |
| 369 | provides compatibility with PyXML on Python 1.5.2. |
| 370 | |
| 371 | - If the platform has a bogus definition for LONG_BIT (the number of |
| 372 | bits in a long), an error will be reported at compile time. |
| 373 | |
| 374 | - Fix bugs in _PyTuple_Resize() which caused hard-to-interpret garbage |
| 375 | collection crashes and possibly other, unreported crashes. |
| 376 | |
| 377 | - Fixed a memory leak in _PyUnicode_Fini(). |
| 378 | |
| 379 | Build issues |
| 380 | |
| 381 | - configure now accepts a --with-suffix option that specifies the |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 382 | executable suffix. This is useful for builds on Cygwin and Mac OS |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 383 | X, for example. |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 384 | |
| 385 | - The mmap.PAGESIZE constant is now initialized using sysconf when |
| 386 | possible, which eliminates a dependency on -lucb for Reliant UNIX. |
| 387 | |
| 388 | - The md5 file should now compile on all platforms. |
| 389 | |
| 390 | - The select module now compiles on platforms that do not define |
| 391 | POLLRDNORM and related constants. |
| 392 | |
| 393 | - Darwin (Mac OS X): Initial support for static builds on this |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 394 | platform. |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 395 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 1092120 | 2000-10-09 18:34:12 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 396 | - BeOS: A number of changes were made to the build and installation |
| 397 | process. ar-fake now operates on a directory of object files. |
| 398 | dl_export.h is gone, and its macros now appear on the mwcc command |
| 399 | line during build on PPC BeOS. |
| 400 | |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 401 | - Platform directory in lib/python2.0 is "plat-beos5" (or |
Jeremy Hylton | 1092120 | 2000-10-09 18:34:12 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 402 | "plat-beos4", if building on BeOS 4.5), rather than "plat-beos". |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 403 | |
| 404 | - Cygwin: Support for shared libraries, Tkinter, and sockets. |
| 405 | |
| 406 | - SunOS 4.1.4_JL: Fix test for directory existence in configure. |
| 407 | |
| 408 | Tools and other miscellany |
| 409 | |
| 410 | - Removed debugging prints from main used with freeze. |
| 411 | |
Tim Peters | 46446d6 | 2000-10-09 21:19:31 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 412 | - IDLE auto-indent no longer crashes when it encounters Unicode |
| 413 | characters. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 414 | |
| 415 | What's new in 2.0 beta 2 (since beta 1)? |
| 416 | ======================================== |
| 417 | |
| 418 | Core language, builtins, and interpreter |
| 419 | |
Tim Peters | 482c021 | 2000-09-26 06:33:09 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 420 | - Add support for unbounded ints in %d,i,u,x,X,o formats; for example |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 421 | "%d" % 2L**64 == "18446744073709551616". |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 422 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 423 | - Add -h and -V command line options to print the usage message and |
| 424 | Python version number and exit immediately. |
| 425 | |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 426 | - eval() and exec accept Unicode objects as code parameters. |
| 427 | |
| 428 | - getattr() and setattr() now also accept Unicode objects for the |
| 429 | attribute name, which are converted to strings using the default |
| 430 | encoding before lookup. |
| 431 | |
| 432 | - Multiplication on string and Unicode now does proper bounds |
| 433 | checking; e.g. 'a' * 65536 * 65536 will raise ValueError, "repeated |
| 434 | string is too long." |
| 435 | |
| 436 | - Better error message when continue is found in try statement in a |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 437 | loop. |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 438 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 439 | |
| 440 | Standard library and extensions |
| 441 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 442 | - array: reverse() method of array now works. buffer_info() now does |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 443 | argument checking; it still takes no arguments. |
| 444 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 445 | - asyncore/asynchat: Included most recent version from Sam Rushing. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 446 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 447 | - cgi: Accept '&' or ';' as separator characters when parsing form data. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 448 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 449 | - CGIHTTPServer: Now works on Windows (and perhaps even Mac). |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 450 | |
| 451 | - ConfigParser: When reading the file, options spelled in upper case |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 452 | letters are now correctly converted to lowercase. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 453 | |
| 454 | - copy: Copy Unicode objects atomically. |
| 455 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 456 | - cPickle: Fail gracefully when copy_reg can't be imported. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 457 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 458 | - cStringIO: Implemented readlines() method. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 459 | |
Fred Drake | 67233bc | 2000-09-26 16:40:27 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 460 | - dbm: Add get() and setdefault() methods to dbm object. Add constant |
| 461 | `library' to module that names the library used. Added doc strings |
| 462 | and method names to error messages. Uses configure to determine |
| 463 | which ndbm.h file to include; Berkeley DB's nbdm and GDBM's ndbm is |
| 464 | now available options. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 465 | |
| 466 | - distutils: Update to version 0.9.3. |
| 467 | |
| 468 | - dl: Add several dl.RTLD_ constants. |
| 469 | |
| 470 | - fpectl: Now supported on FreeBSD. |
| 471 | |
| 472 | - gc: Add DEBUG_SAVEALL option. When enabled all garbage objects |
| 473 | found by the collector will be saved in gc.garbage. This is useful |
| 474 | for debugging a program that creates reference cycles. |
| 475 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 476 | - httplib: Three changes: Restore support for set_debuglevel feature |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 477 | of HTTP class. Do not close socket on zero-length response. Do not |
| 478 | crash when server sends invalid content-length header. |
| 479 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 480 | - mailbox: Mailbox class conforms better to qmail specifications. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 481 | |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 482 | - marshal: When reading a short, sign-extend on platforms where shorts |
| 483 | are bigger than 16 bits. When reading a long, repair the unportable |
| 484 | sign extension that was being done for 64-bit machines. (It assumed |
| 485 | that signed right shift sign-extends.) |
| 486 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 487 | - operator: Add contains(), invert(), __invert__() as aliases for |
| 488 | __contains__(), inv(), and __inv__() respectively. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 489 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 490 | - os: Add support for popen2() and popen3() on all platforms where |
| 491 | fork() exists. (popen4() is still in the works.) |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 492 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 493 | - os: (Windows only:) Add startfile() function that acts like double- |
Tim Peters | 482c021 | 2000-09-26 06:33:09 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 494 | clicking on a file in Explorer (or passing the file name to the |
| 495 | DOS "start" command). |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 496 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 497 | - os.path: (Windows, DOS:) Treat trailing colon correctly in |
Tim Peters | 482c021 | 2000-09-26 06:33:09 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 498 | os.path.join. os.path.join("a:", "b") yields "a:b". |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 499 | |
| 500 | - pickle: Now raises ValueError when an invalid pickle that contains |
| 501 | a non-string repr where a string repr was expected. This behavior |
| 502 | matches cPickle. |
| 503 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 504 | - posixfile: Remove broken __del__() method. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 505 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 506 | - py_compile: support CR+LF line terminators in source file. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 507 | |
| 508 | - readline: Does not immediately exit when ^C is hit when readline and |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 509 | threads are configured. Adds definition of rl_library_version. (The |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 510 | latter addition requires GNU readline 2.2 or later.) |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 511 | |
| 512 | - rfc822: Domain literals returned by AddrlistClass method |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 513 | getdomainliteral() are now properly wrapped in brackets. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 514 | |
| 515 | - site: sys.setdefaultencoding() should only be called in case the |
Tim Peters | 482c021 | 2000-09-26 06:33:09 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 516 | standard default encoding ("ascii") is changed. This saves quite a |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 517 | few cycles during startup since the first call to |
| 518 | setdefaultencoding() will initialize the codec registry and the |
| 519 | encodings package. |
| 520 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 521 | - socket: Support for size hint in readlines() method of object returned |
| 522 | by makefile(). |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 523 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 524 | - sre: Added experimental expand() method to match objects. Does not |
Jeremy Hylton | 625915e | 2000-10-02 13:43:33 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 525 | use buffer interface on Unicode strings. Does not hang if group id |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 526 | is followed by whitespace. |
| 527 | |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 528 | - StringIO: Size hint in readlines() is now supported as documented. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 529 | |
| 530 | - struct: Check ranges for bytes and shorts. |
| 531 | |
| 532 | - urllib: Improved handling of win32 proxy settings. Fixed quote and |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 533 | quote_plus functions so that the always encode a comma. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 534 | |
| 535 | - Tkinter: Image objects are now guaranteed to have unique ids. Set |
| 536 | event.delta to zero if Tk version doesn't support mousewheel. |
| 537 | Removed some debugging prints. |
| 538 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 539 | - UserList: now implements __contains__(). |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 540 | |
Fred Drake | 67233bc | 2000-09-26 16:40:27 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 541 | - webbrowser: On Windows, use os.startfile() instead of os.popen(), |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 542 | which works around a bug in Norton AntiVirus 2000 that leads directly |
| 543 | to a Blue Screen freeze. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 544 | |
| 545 | - xml: New version detection code allows PyXML to override standard |
| 546 | XML package if PyXML version is greater than 0.6.1. |
| 547 | |
Fred Drake | 64bb380 | 2000-09-26 16:21:35 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 548 | - xml.dom: DOM level 1 support for basic XML. Includes xml.dom.minidom |
| 549 | (conventional DOM), and xml.dom.pulldom, which allows building the DOM |
| 550 | tree only for nodes which are sufficiently interesting to a specific |
| 551 | application. Does not provide the HTML-specific extensions. Still |
| 552 | undocumented. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 553 | |
Fred Drake | 64bb380 | 2000-09-26 16:21:35 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 554 | - xml.sax: SAX 2 support for Python, including all the handler |
| 555 | interfaces needed to process XML 1.0 compliant XML. Some |
| 556 | documentation is already available. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 557 | |
Fred Drake | 64bb380 | 2000-09-26 16:21:35 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 558 | - pyexpat: Renamed to xml.parsers.expat since this is part of the new, |
| 559 | packagized XML support. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 560 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 561 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 562 | C API |
| 563 | |
| 564 | - Add three new convenience functions for module initialization -- |
| 565 | PyModule_AddObject(), PyModule_AddIntConstant(), and |
| 566 | PyModule_AddStringConstant(). |
| 567 | |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 568 | - Cleaned up definition of NULL in C source code; all definitions were |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 569 | removed and add #error to Python.h if NULL isn't defined after |
| 570 | #include of stdio.h. |
| 571 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 572 | - Py_PROTO() macros that were removed in 2.0b1 have been restored for |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 573 | backwards compatibility (at the source level) with old extensions. |
| 574 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 575 | - A wrapper API was added for signal() and sigaction(). Instead of |
| 576 | either function, always use PyOS_getsig() to get a signal handler |
| 577 | and PyOS_setsig() to set one. A new convenience typedef |
| 578 | PyOS_sighandler_t is defined for the type of signal handlers. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 579 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 580 | - Add PyString_AsStringAndSize() function that provides access to the |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 581 | internal data buffer and size of a string object -- or the default |
| 582 | encoded version of a Unicode object. |
| 583 | |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 584 | - PyString_Size() and PyString_AsString() accept Unicode objects. |
| 585 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 586 | - The standard header <limits.h> is now included by Python.h (if it |
Fred Drake | 64bb380 | 2000-09-26 16:21:35 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 587 | exists). INT_MAX and LONG_MAX will always be defined, even if |
| 588 | <limits.h> is not available. |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 589 | |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 590 | - PyFloat_FromString takes a second argument, pend, that was |
| 591 | effectively useless. It is now officially useless but preserved for |
| 592 | backwards compatibility. If the pend argument is not NULL, *pend is |
| 593 | set to NULL. |
| 594 | |
| 595 | - PyObject_GetAttr() and PyObject_SetAttr() now accept Unicode objects |
| 596 | for the attribute name. See note on getattr() above. |
| 597 | |
| 598 | - A few bug fixes to argument processing for Unicode. |
| 599 | PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() now accepts "es#" and "es". |
| 600 | PyArg_Parse() special cases "s#" for Unicode objects; it returns a |
| 601 | pointer to the default encoded string data instead of to the raw |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 602 | UTF-16. |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 603 | |
| 604 | - Py_BuildValue accepts B format (for bgen-generated code). |
| 605 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 606 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 607 | Internals |
| 608 | |
| 609 | - On Unix, fix code for finding Python installation directory so that |
| 610 | it works when argv[0] is a relative path. |
| 611 | |
Andrew M. Kuchling | a1099be | 2000-12-15 01:16:43 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 612 | - Added a true unicode_internal_encode() function and fixed the |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 613 | unicode_internal_decode function() to support Unicode objects directly |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 614 | rather than by generating a copy of the object. |
| 615 | |
Tim Peters | 482c021 | 2000-09-26 06:33:09 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 616 | - Several of the internal Unicode tables are much smaller now, and |
| 617 | the source code should be much friendlier to weaker compilers. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 618 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 97693b0 | 2000-09-26 17:42:51 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 619 | - In the garbage collector: Fixed bug in collection of tuples. Fixed |
| 620 | bug that caused some instances to be removed from the container set |
| 621 | while they were still live. Fixed parsing in gc.set_debug() for |
| 622 | platforms where sizeof(long) > sizeof(int). |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 623 | |
| 624 | - Fixed refcount problem in instance deallocation that only occurred |
| 625 | when Py_REF_DEBUG was defined and Py_TRACE_REFS was not. |
| 626 | |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 627 | - On Windows, getpythonregpath is now protected against null data in |
| 628 | registry key. |
| 629 | |
| 630 | - On Unix, create .pyc/.pyo files with O_EXCL flag to avoid a race |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 631 | condition. |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 632 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 633 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 634 | Build and platform-specific issues |
| 635 | |
| 636 | - Better support of GNU Pth via --with-pth configure option. |
| 637 | |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 638 | - Python/C API now properly exposed to dynamically-loaded extension |
| 639 | modules on Reliant UNIX. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 640 | |
| 641 | - Changes for the benefit of SunOS 4.1.4 (really!). mmapmodule.c: |
| 642 | Don't define MS_SYNC to be zero when it is undefined. Added missing |
| 643 | prototypes in posixmodule.c. |
| 644 | |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 645 | - Improved support for HP-UX build. Threads should now be correctly |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 646 | configured (on HP-UX 10.20 and 11.00). |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 647 | |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 648 | - Fix largefile support on older NetBSD systems and OpenBSD by adding |
| 649 | define for TELL64. |
| 650 | |
| 651 | |
| 652 | Tools and other miscellany |
| 653 | |
| 654 | - ftpmirror: Call to main() is wrapped in if __name__ == "__main__". |
| 655 | |
| 656 | - freeze: The modulefinder now works with 2.0 opcodes. |
| 657 | |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 658 | - IDLE: |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 659 | Move hackery of sys.argv until after the Tk instance has been |
| 660 | created, which allows the application-specific Tkinter |
| 661 | initialization to be executed if present; also pass an explicit |
| 662 | className parameter to the Tk() constructor. |
Fred Drake | 64bb380 | 2000-09-26 16:21:35 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 663 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 664 | |
| 665 | What's new in 2.0 beta 1? |
| 666 | ========================= |
| 667 | |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 668 | Source Incompatibilities |
| 669 | ------------------------ |
| 670 | |
| 671 | None. Note that 1.6 introduced several incompatibilities with 1.5.2, |
| 672 | such as single-argument append(), connect() and bind(), and changes to |
| 673 | str(long) and repr(float). |
| 674 | |
| 675 | |
| 676 | Binary Incompatibilities |
| 677 | ------------------------ |
| 678 | |
| 679 | - Third party extensions built for Python 1.5.x or 1.6 cannot be used |
| 680 | with Python 2.0; these extensions will have to be rebuilt for Python |
| 681 | 2.0. |
| 682 | |
| 683 | - On Windows, attempting to import a third party extension built for |
| 684 | Python 1.5.x or 1.6 results in an immediate crash; there's not much we |
| 685 | can do about this. Check your PYTHONPATH environment variable! |
| 686 | |
| 687 | - Python bytecode files (*.pyc and *.pyo) are not compatible between |
| 688 | releases. |
| 689 | |
| 690 | |
| 691 | Overview of Changes Since 1.6 |
| 692 | ----------------------------- |
| 693 | |
| 694 | There are many new modules (including brand new XML support through |
| 695 | the xml package, and i18n support through the gettext module); a list |
| 696 | of all new modules is included below. Lots of bugs have been fixed. |
| 697 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 698 | The process for making major new changes to the language has changed |
| 699 | since Python 1.6. Enhancements must now be documented by a Python |
| 700 | Enhancement Proposal (PEP) before they can be accepted. |
| 701 | |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 702 | There are several important syntax enhancements, described in more |
| 703 | detail below: |
| 704 | |
| 705 | - Augmented assignment, e.g. x += 1 |
| 706 | |
| 707 | - List comprehensions, e.g. [x**2 for x in range(10)] |
| 708 | |
| 709 | - Extended import statement, e.g. import Module as Name |
| 710 | |
| 711 | - Extended print statement, e.g. print >> file, "Hello" |
| 712 | |
| 713 | Other important changes: |
| 714 | |
| 715 | - Optional collection of cyclical garbage |
| 716 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 717 | Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) |
| 718 | --------------------------------- |
| 719 | |
| 720 | PEP stands for Python Enhancement Proposal. A PEP is a design |
| 721 | document providing information to the Python community, or describing |
| 722 | a new feature for Python. The PEP should provide a concise technical |
| 723 | specification of the feature and a rationale for the feature. |
| 724 | |
| 725 | We intend PEPs to be the primary mechanisms for proposing new |
| 726 | features, for collecting community input on an issue, and for |
| 727 | documenting the design decisions that have gone into Python. The PEP |
| 728 | author is responsible for building consensus within the community and |
| 729 | documenting dissenting opinions. |
| 730 | |
| 731 | The PEPs are available at http://python.sourceforge.net/peps/. |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 732 | |
| 733 | Augmented Assignment |
| 734 | -------------------- |
| 735 | |
| 736 | This must have been the most-requested feature of the past years! |
| 737 | Eleven new assignment operators were added: |
| 738 | |
Guido van Rossum | e905e95 | 2000-09-05 12:42:46 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 739 | += -= *= /= %= **= <<= >>= &= ^= |= |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 740 | |
| 741 | For example, |
| 742 | |
| 743 | A += B |
| 744 | |
| 745 | is similar to |
| 746 | |
| 747 | A = A + B |
| 748 | |
| 749 | except that A is evaluated only once (relevant when A is something |
| 750 | like dict[index].attr). |
| 751 | |
| 752 | However, if A is a mutable object, A may be modified in place. Thus, |
| 753 | if A is a number or a string, A += B has the same effect as A = A+B |
| 754 | (except A is only evaluated once); but if a is a list, A += B has the |
| 755 | same effect as A.extend(B)! |
| 756 | |
| 757 | Classes and built-in object types can override the new operators in |
| 758 | order to implement the in-place behavior; the not-in-place behavior is |
| 759 | used automatically as a fallback when an object doesn't implement the |
| 760 | in-place behavior. For classes, the method name is derived from the |
| 761 | method name for the corresponding not-in-place operator by inserting |
| 762 | an 'i' in front of the name, e.g. __iadd__ implements in-place |
| 763 | __add__. |
| 764 | |
| 765 | Augmented assignment was implemented by Thomas Wouters. |
| 766 | |
| 767 | |
| 768 | List Comprehensions |
| 769 | ------------------- |
| 770 | |
| 771 | This is a flexible new notation for lists whose elements are computed |
| 772 | from another list (or lists). The simplest form is: |
| 773 | |
| 774 | [<expression> for <variable> in <sequence>] |
| 775 | |
Guido van Rossum | 56db095 | 2000-09-06 23:34:25 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 776 | For example, [i**2 for i in range(4)] yields the list [0, 1, 4, 9]. |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 777 | This is more efficient than a for loop with a list.append() call. |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 778 | |
| 779 | You can also add a condition: |
| 780 | |
| 781 | [<expression> for <variable> in <sequence> if <condition>] |
| 782 | |
| 783 | For example, [w for w in words if w == w.lower()] would yield the list |
| 784 | of words that contain no uppercase characters. This is more efficient |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 785 | than a for loop with an if statement and a list.append() call. |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 786 | |
| 787 | You can also have nested for loops and more than one 'if' clause. For |
| 788 | example, here's a function that flattens a sequence of sequences:: |
| 789 | |
| 790 | def flatten(seq): |
| 791 | return [x for subseq in seq for x in subseq] |
| 792 | |
| 793 | flatten([[0], [1,2,3], [4,5], [6,7,8,9], []]) |
| 794 | |
| 795 | This prints |
| 796 | |
| 797 | [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9] |
| 798 | |
| 799 | List comprehensions originated as a patch set from Greg Ewing; Skip |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 800 | Montanaro and Thomas Wouters also contributed. Described by PEP 202. |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 801 | |
| 802 | |
| 803 | Extended Import Statement |
| 804 | ------------------------- |
| 805 | |
| 806 | Many people have asked for a way to import a module under a different |
| 807 | name. This can be accomplished like this: |
| 808 | |
| 809 | import foo |
| 810 | bar = foo |
| 811 | del foo |
| 812 | |
| 813 | but this common idiom gets old quickly. A simple extension of the |
| 814 | import statement now allows this to be written as follows: |
| 815 | |
| 816 | import foo as bar |
| 817 | |
| 818 | There's also a variant for 'from ... import': |
| 819 | |
| 820 | from foo import bar as spam |
| 821 | |
| 822 | This also works with packages; e.g. you can write this: |
| 823 | |
| 824 | import test.regrtest as regrtest |
| 825 | |
| 826 | Note that 'as' is not a new keyword -- it is recognized only in this |
| 827 | context (this is only possible because the syntax for the import |
| 828 | statement doesn't involve expressions). |
| 829 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 830 | Implemented by Thomas Wouters. Described by PEP 221. |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 831 | |
| 832 | |
| 833 | Extended Print Statement |
| 834 | ------------------------ |
| 835 | |
| 836 | Easily the most controversial new feature, this extension to the print |
| 837 | statement adds an option to make the output go to a different file |
| 838 | than the default sys.stdout. |
| 839 | |
| 840 | For example, to write an error message to sys.stderr, you can now |
| 841 | write: |
| 842 | |
| 843 | print >> sys.stderr, "Error: bad dog!" |
| 844 | |
| 845 | As a special feature, if the expression used to indicate the file |
Fred Drake | 45888ff | 2000-09-29 17:09:11 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 846 | evaluates to None, the current value of sys.stdout is used. Thus: |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 847 | |
| 848 | print >> None, "Hello world" |
| 849 | |
| 850 | is equivalent to |
| 851 | |
| 852 | print "Hello world" |
| 853 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 854 | Design and implementation by Barry Warsaw. Described by PEP 214. |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 855 | |
| 856 | |
| 857 | Optional Collection of Cyclical Garbage |
| 858 | --------------------------------------- |
| 859 | |
| 860 | Python is now equipped with a garbage collector that can hunt down |
| 861 | cyclical references between Python objects. It's no replacement for |
| 862 | reference counting; in fact, it depends on the reference counts being |
| 863 | correct, and decides that a set of objects belong to a cycle if all |
| 864 | their reference counts can be accounted for from their references to |
| 865 | each other. This devious scheme was first proposed by Eric Tiedemann, |
| 866 | and brought to implementation by Neil Schemenauer. |
| 867 | |
| 868 | There's a module "gc" that lets you control some parameters of the |
| 869 | garbage collection. There's also an option to the configure script |
| 870 | that lets you enable or disable the garbage collection. In 2.0b1, |
| 871 | it's on by default, so that we (hopefully) can collect decent user |
| 872 | experience with this new feature. There are some questions about its |
Fred Drake | 9f11cf8 | 2000-09-29 17:54:40 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 873 | performance. If it proves to be too much of a problem, we'll turn it |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 874 | off by default in the final 2.0 release. |
| 875 | |
| 876 | |
| 877 | Smaller Changes |
| 878 | --------------- |
| 879 | |
| 880 | A new function zip() was added. zip(seq1, seq2, ...) is equivalent to |
| 881 | map(None, seq1, seq2, ...) when the sequences have the same length; |
| 882 | i.e. zip([1,2,3], [10,20,30]) returns [(1,10), (2,20), (3,30)]. When |
| 883 | the lists are not all the same length, the shortest list wins: |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 884 | zip([1,2,3], [10,20]) returns [(1,10), (2,20)]. See PEP 201. |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 885 | |
| 886 | sys.version_info is a tuple (major, minor, micro, level, serial). |
| 887 | |
| 888 | Dictionaries have an odd new method, setdefault(key, default). |
| 889 | dict.setdefault(key, default) returns dict[key] if it exists; if not, |
| 890 | it sets dict[key] to default and returns that value. Thus: |
| 891 | |
| 892 | dict.setdefault(key, []).append(item) |
| 893 | |
| 894 | does the same work as this common idiom: |
| 895 | |
| 896 | if not dict.has_key(key): |
| 897 | dict[key] = [] |
| 898 | dict[key].append(item) |
| 899 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 900 | There are two new variants of SyntaxError that are raised for |
| 901 | indentation-related errors: IndentationError and TabError. |
| 902 | |
| 903 | Changed \x to consume exactly two hex digits; see PEP 223. Added \U |
| 904 | escape that consumes exactly eight hex digits. |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 905 | |
| 906 | The limits on the size of expressions and file in Python source code |
| 907 | have been raised from 2**16 to 2**32. Previous versions of Python |
| 908 | were limited because the maximum argument size the Python VM accepted |
| 909 | was 2**16. This limited the size of object constructor expressions, |
| 910 | e.g. [1,2,3] or {'a':1, 'b':2}, and the size of source files. This |
| 911 | limit was raised thanks to a patch by Charles Waldman that effectively |
| 912 | fixes the problem. It is now much more likely that you will be |
| 913 | limited by available memory than by an arbitrary limit in Python. |
| 914 | |
| 915 | The interpreter's maximum recursion depth can be modified by Python |
| 916 | programs using sys.getrecursionlimit and sys.setrecursionlimit. This |
| 917 | limit is the maximum number of recursive calls that can be made by |
| 918 | Python code. The limit exists to prevent infinite recursion from |
| 919 | overflowing the C stack and causing a core dump. The default value is |
| 920 | 1000. The maximum safe value for a particular platform can be found |
| 921 | by running Misc/find_recursionlimit.py. |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 922 | |
| 923 | New Modules and Packages |
| 924 | ------------------------ |
| 925 | |
| 926 | atexit - for registering functions to be called when Python exits. |
| 927 | |
| 928 | imputil - Greg Stein's alternative API for writing custom import |
| 929 | hooks. |
| 930 | |
| 931 | pyexpat - an interface to the Expat XML parser, contributed by Paul |
| 932 | Prescod. |
| 933 | |
| 934 | xml - a new package with XML support code organized (so far) in three |
| 935 | subpackages: xml.dom, xml.sax, and xml.parsers. Describing these |
| 936 | would fill a volume. There's a special feature whereby a |
| 937 | user-installed package named _xmlplus overrides the standard |
| 938 | xmlpackage; this is intended to give the XML SIG a hook to distribute |
| 939 | backwards-compatible updates to the standard xml package. |
| 940 | |
| 941 | webbrowser - a platform-independent API to launch a web browser. |
| 942 | |
| 943 | |
Guido van Rossum | e905e95 | 2000-09-05 12:42:46 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 944 | Changed Modules |
| 945 | --------------- |
| 946 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 947 | array -- new methods for array objects: count, extend, index, pop, and |
| 948 | remove |
| 949 | |
| 950 | binascii -- new functions b2a_hex and a2b_hex that convert between |
| 951 | binary data and its hex representation |
| 952 | |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 953 | calendar -- Many new functions that support features including control |
| 954 | over which day of the week is the first day, returning strings instead |
| 955 | of printing them. Also new symbolic constants for days of week, |
| 956 | e.g. MONDAY, ..., SUNDAY. |
| 957 | |
| 958 | cgi -- FieldStorage objects have a getvalue method that works like a |
| 959 | dictionary's get method and returns the value attribute of the object. |
| 960 | |
| 961 | ConfigParser -- The parser object has new methods has_option, |
| 962 | remove_section, remove_option, set, and write. They allow the module |
| 963 | to be used for writing config files as well as reading them. |
| 964 | |
| 965 | ftplib -- ntransfercmd(), transfercmd(), and retrbinary() all now |
Guido van Rossum | e905e95 | 2000-09-05 12:42:46 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 966 | optionally support the RFC 959 REST command. |
| 967 | |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 968 | gzip -- readline and readlines now accept optional size arguments |
Guido van Rossum | e905e95 | 2000-09-05 12:42:46 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 969 | |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 970 | httplib -- New interfaces and support for HTTP/1.1 by Greg Stein. See |
| 971 | the module doc strings for details. |
Guido van Rossum | 830ca2a | 2000-09-05 15:34:16 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 972 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 973 | locale -- implement getdefaultlocale for Win32 and Macintosh |
| 974 | |
| 975 | marshal -- no longer dumps core when marshaling deeply nested or |
| 976 | recursive data structures |
| 977 | |
| 978 | os -- new functions isatty, seteuid, setegid, setreuid, setregid |
| 979 | |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 980 | os/popen2 -- popen2/popen3/popen4 support under Windows. popen2/popen3 |
| 981 | support under Unix. |
| 982 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 983 | os/pty -- support for openpty and forkpty |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 984 | |
| 985 | os.path -- fix semantics of os.path.commonprefix |
| 986 | |
| 987 | smtplib -- support for sending very long messages |
| 988 | |
| 989 | socket -- new function getfqdn() |
| 990 | |
| 991 | readline -- new functions to read, write and truncate history files. |
| 992 | The readline section of the library reference manual contains an |
| 993 | example. |
| 994 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 995 | select -- add interface to poll system call |
| 996 | |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 997 | shutil -- new copyfileobj function |
| 998 | |
| 999 | SimpleHTTPServer, CGIHTTPServer -- Fix problems with buffering in the |
| 1000 | HTTP server. |
| 1001 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1002 | Tkinter -- optimization of function flatten |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1003 | |
| 1004 | urllib -- scans environment variables for proxy configuration, |
Tim Peters | 8b09233 | 2000-09-05 20:15:25 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1005 | e.g. http_proxy. |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1006 | |
| 1007 | whichdb -- recognizes dumbdbm format |
Guido van Rossum | e905e95 | 2000-09-05 12:42:46 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1008 | |
| 1009 | |
| 1010 | Obsolete Modules |
| 1011 | ---------------- |
| 1012 | |
| 1013 | None. However note that 1.6 made a whole slew of modules obsolete: |
| 1014 | stdwin, soundex, cml, cmpcache, dircache, dump, find, grep, packmail, |
| 1015 | poly, zmod, strop, util, whatsound. |
| 1016 | |
| 1017 | |
| 1018 | Changed, New, Obsolete Tools |
| 1019 | ---------------------------- |
| 1020 | |
Tim Peters | 8b09233 | 2000-09-05 20:15:25 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1021 | None. |
Guido van Rossum | e905e95 | 2000-09-05 12:42:46 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1022 | |
| 1023 | |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1024 | C-level Changes |
| 1025 | --------------- |
| 1026 | |
| 1027 | Several cleanup jobs were carried out throughout the source code. |
| 1028 | |
| 1029 | All C code was converted to ANSI C; we got rid of all uses of the |
| 1030 | Py_PROTO() macro, which makes the header files a lot more readable. |
| 1031 | |
| 1032 | Most of the portability hacks were moved to a new header file, |
| 1033 | pyport.h; several other new header files were added and some old |
| 1034 | header files were removed, in an attempt to create a more rational set |
| 1035 | of header files. (Few of these ever need to be included explicitly; |
| 1036 | they are all included by Python.h.) |
| 1037 | |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1038 | Trent Mick ensured portability to 64-bit platforms, under both Linux |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1039 | and Win64, especially for the new Intel Itanium processor. Mick also |
| 1040 | added large file support for Linux64 and Win64. |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1041 | |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1042 | The C APIs to return an object's size have been update to consistently |
| 1043 | use the form PyXXX_Size, e.g. PySequence_Size and PyDict_Size. In |
| 1044 | previous versions, the abstract interfaces used PyXXX_Length and the |
| 1045 | concrete interfaces used PyXXX_Size. The old names, |
| 1046 | e.g. PyObject_Length, are still available for backwards compatibility |
| 1047 | at the API level, but are deprecated. |
| 1048 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1049 | The PyOS_CheckStack function has been implemented on Windows by |
| 1050 | Fredrik Lundh. It prevents Python from failing with a stack overflow |
| 1051 | on Windows. |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1052 | |
| 1053 | The GC changes resulted in creation of two new slots on object, |
| 1054 | tp_traverse and tp_clear. The augmented assignment changes result in |
Guido van Rossum | 4338a28 | 2000-09-06 13:02:08 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1055 | the creation of a new slot for each in-place operator. |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1056 | |
| 1057 | The GC API creates new requirements for container types implemented in |
Guido van Rossum | 4338a28 | 2000-09-06 13:02:08 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1058 | C extension modules. See Include/objimpl.h for details. |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1059 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1060 | PyErr_Format has been updated to automatically calculate the size of |
| 1061 | the buffer needed to hold the formatted result string. This change |
| 1062 | prevents crashes caused by programmer error. |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1063 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1064 | New C API calls: PyObject_AsFileDescriptor, PyErr_WriteUnraisable. |
Guido van Rossum | e905e95 | 2000-09-05 12:42:46 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1065 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1066 | PyRun_AnyFileEx, PyRun_SimpleFileEx, PyRun_FileEx -- New functions |
| 1067 | that are the same as their non-Ex counterparts except they take an |
| 1068 | extra flag argument that tells them to close the file when done. |
| 1069 | |
| 1070 | XXX There were other API changes that should be fleshed out here. |
Guido van Rossum | ab9d6f0 | 1998-08-10 22:01:13 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1071 | |
Tim Peters | 8b09233 | 2000-09-05 20:15:25 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1072 | |
| 1073 | Windows Changes |
| 1074 | --------------- |
| 1075 | |
| 1076 | New popen2/popen3/peopen4 in os module (see Changed Modules above). |
| 1077 | |
| 1078 | os.popen is much more usable on Windows 95 and 98. See Microsoft |
| 1079 | Knowledge Base article Q150956. The Win9x workaround described there |
| 1080 | is implemented by the new w9xpopen.exe helper in the root of your |
| 1081 | Python installation. Note that Python uses this internally; it is not |
| 1082 | a standalone program. |
| 1083 | |
| 1084 | Administrator privileges are no longer required to install Python |
| 1085 | on Windows NT or Windows 2000. If you have administrator privileges, |
| 1086 | Python's registry info will be written under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. |
| 1087 | Otherwise the installer backs off to writing Python's registry info |
Guido van Rossum | 4338a28 | 2000-09-06 13:02:08 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1088 | under HKEY_CURRENT_USER. The latter is sufficient for all "normal" |
Tim Peters | 8b09233 | 2000-09-05 20:15:25 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1089 | uses of Python, but will prevent some advanced uses from working |
| 1090 | (for example, running a Python script as an NT service, or possibly |
| 1091 | from CGI). |
| 1092 | |
| 1093 | [This was new in 1.6] The installer no longer runs a separate Tcl/Tk |
| 1094 | installer; instead, it installs the needed Tcl/Tk files directly in the |
| 1095 | Python directory. If you already have a Tcl/Tk installation, this |
| 1096 | wastes some disk space (about 4 Megs) but avoids problems with |
| 1097 | conflicting Tcl/Tk installations, and makes it much easier for Python |
| 1098 | to ensure that Tcl/Tk can find all its files. |
| 1099 | |
| 1100 | [This was new in 1.6] The Windows installer now installs by default in |
| 1101 | \Python20\ on the default volume, instead of \Program Files\Python-2.0\. |
| 1102 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1103 | |
| 1104 | Updates to the changes between 1.5.2 and 1.6 |
| 1105 | -------------------------------------------- |
| 1106 | |
| 1107 | The 1.6 NEWS file can't be changed after the release is done, so here |
| 1108 | is some late-breaking news: |
| 1109 | |
| 1110 | New APIs in locale.py: normalize(), getdefaultlocale(), resetlocale(), |
| 1111 | and changes to getlocale() and setlocale(). |
| 1112 | |
| 1113 | The new module is now enabled per default. |
| 1114 | |
| 1115 | It is not true that the encodings codecs cannot be used for normal |
| 1116 | strings: the string.encode() (which is also present on 8-bit strings |
| 1117 | !) allows using them for 8-bit strings too, e.g. to convert files from |
| 1118 | cp1252 (Windows) to latin-1 or vice-versa. |
| 1119 | |
| 1120 | Japanese codecs are available from Tamito KAJIYAMA: |
| 1121 | http://pseudo.grad.sccs.chukyo-u.ac.jp/~kajiyama/python/ |
| 1122 | |
| 1123 | |
Guido van Rossum | ab9d6f0 | 1998-08-10 22:01:13 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1124 | ====================================================================== |