blob: 15393fe769ea8ede16fa44dce000a4e5555d974a [file] [log] [blame]
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00001What's New in Python 2.0b2?
Guido van Rossum61000331997-08-15 04:39:58 +00002===========================
3
Guido van Rossum8ed602b2000-09-01 22:34:33 +00004Below is a list of all relevant changes since release 1.6. Older
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00005changes are in the file HISTORY. If you are making the jump directly
6from Python 1.5.2 to 2.0, make sure to read the section for 1.6 in the
7HISTORY file! Many important changes listed there.
Guido van Rossum61000331997-08-15 04:39:58 +00008
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00009Alternatively, a good overview of the changes between 1.5.2 and 2.0 is
10the document "What's New in Python 2.0" by Kuchling and Moshe Zadka:
11http://starship.python.net/crew/amk/python/writing/new-python/.
Guido van Rossum1f83cce1997-10-06 21:04:35 +000012
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +000013--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.pythonlabs.com/~guido/)
Guido van Rossum437cfe81999-04-08 20:17:57 +000014
15======================================================================
16
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +000017
18What's new in 2.0 beta 2 (since beta 1)?
19========================================
20
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +000021
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +000022Core language, builtins, and interpreter
23
Tim Peters482c0212000-09-26 06:33:09 +000024- Add support for unbounded ints in %d,i,u,x,X,o formats; for example
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +000025 "%d" % 2L**64 == "18446744073709551616".
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +000026
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +000027- Add -h and -V command line options to print the usage message and
28 Python version number and exit immediately.
29
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +000030
31Standard library and extensions
32
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +000033- array: reverse() method of array now works. buffer_info() now does
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +000034 argument checking; it still takes no arguments.
35
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +000036- asyncore/asynchat: Included most recent version from Sam Rushing.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +000037
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +000038- cgi: Accept '&' or ';' as separator characters when parsing form data.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +000039
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +000040- CGIHTTPServer: Now works on Windows (and perhaps even Mac).
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +000041
42- ConfigParser: When reading the file, options spelled in upper case
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +000043 letters are now correctly converted to lowercase.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +000044
45- copy: Copy Unicode objects atomically.
46
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +000047- cPickle: Fail gracefully when copy_reg can't be imported.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +000048
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +000049- cStringIO: Implemented readlines() method.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +000050
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +000051- dbm: Add set() and setdefault() methods to dbm object. Add constant
52 `library' to module that names the library used. Better doc strings
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +000053 and argument checking. Uses configure to determine which ndbm.h
54 file to include; Berkeley DB's nbdm is now an option.
55
56- distutils: Update to version 0.9.3.
57
58- dl: Add several dl.RTLD_ constants.
59
60- fpectl: Now supported on FreeBSD.
61
62- gc: Add DEBUG_SAVEALL option. When enabled all garbage objects
63 found by the collector will be saved in gc.garbage. This is useful
64 for debugging a program that creates reference cycles.
65
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +000066- httplib: Three changes: Restore support for set_debuglevel feature
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +000067 of HTTP class. Do not close socket on zero-length response. Do not
68 crash when server sends invalid content-length header.
69
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +000070- mailbox: Mailbox class conforms better to qmail specifications.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +000071
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +000072- operator: Add contains(), invert(), __invert__() as aliases for
73 __contains__(), inv(), and __inv__() respectively.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +000074
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +000075- os: Add support for popen2() and popen3() on all platforms where
76 fork() exists. (popen4() is still in the works.)
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +000077
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +000078- os: (Windows only:) Add startfile() function that acts like double-
Tim Peters482c0212000-09-26 06:33:09 +000079 clicking on a file in Explorer (or passing the file name to the
80 DOS "start" command).
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +000081
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +000082- os.path: (Windows, DOS:) Treat trailing colon correctly in
Tim Peters482c0212000-09-26 06:33:09 +000083 os.path.join. os.path.join("a:", "b") yields "a:b".
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +000084
85- pickle: Now raises ValueError when an invalid pickle that contains
86 a non-string repr where a string repr was expected. This behavior
87 matches cPickle.
88
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +000089- posixfile: Remove broken __del__() method.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +000090
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +000091- py_compile: support CR+LF line terminators in source file.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +000092
93- readline: Does not immediately exit when ^C is hit when readline and
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +000094 threads are configured. Adds defintion of rl_library_version. (The
95 latter addition requires GNU readline 2.2 or later.)
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +000096
97- rfc822: Domain literals returned by AddrlistClass method
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +000098 getdomainliteral() are now properly wrapped in brackets.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +000099
100- site: sys.setdefaultencoding() should only be called in case the
Tim Peters482c0212000-09-26 06:33:09 +0000101 standard default encoding ("ascii") is changed. This saves quite a
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000102 few cycles during startup since the first call to
103 setdefaultencoding() will initialize the codec registry and the
104 encodings package.
105
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000106- socket: Support for size hint in readlines() method of object returned
107 by makefile().
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000108
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000109- sre: Added experimental expand() method to match objects. Does not
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000110 user buffer interface on Unicode strings. Does not hang if group id
111 is followed by whitespace.
112
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000113- StringIO: size hint in readlines() is now supported as documented.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000114
115- struct: Check ranges for bytes and shorts.
116
117- urllib: Improved handling of win32 proxy settings. Fixed quote and
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000118 quote_plus functions so that the always encode a comma.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000119
120- Tkinter: Image objects are now guaranteed to have unique ids. Set
121 event.delta to zero if Tk version doesn't support mousewheel.
122 Removed some debugging prints.
123
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000124- UserList: now implements __contains__().
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000125
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000126- webbrower: On Windows, use os.startfile() instead of os.popen(),
127 which works around a bug in Norton AntiVirus 2000 that leads directly
128 to a Blue Screen freeze.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000129
130- xml: New version detection code allows PyXML to override standard
131 XML package if PyXML version is greater than 0.6.1.
132
133- xml.dom: XXX
134
135- xml.sax: XXX
136
137- XXX pyexpat: XXX
138
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000139
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000140C API
141
142- Add three new convenience functions for module initialization --
143 PyModule_AddObject(), PyModule_AddIntConstant(), and
144 PyModule_AddStringConstant().
145
146- Cleaned up definition of NULL in C source code; all defintions were
147 removed and add #error to Python.h if NULL isn't defined after
148 #include of stdio.h.
149
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000150- Py_PROTO() macros that were removed in 2.0b1 have been restored for
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000151 backwards compatibility (at the source level) with old extensions.
152
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000153- A wrapper API was added for signal() and sigaction(). Instead of
154 either function, always use PyOS_getsig() to get a signal handler
155 and PyOS_setsig() to set one. A new convenience typedef
156 PyOS_sighandler_t is defined for the type of signal handlers.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000157
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000158- Add PyString_AsStringAndSize() function that provides access to the
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000159 internal data buffer and size of a string object -- or the default
160 encoded version of a Unicode object.
161
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000162- The standard header <limits.h> is now included by Python.h (if it
163 exists).
164
165
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000166Internals
167
168- On Unix, fix code for finding Python installation directory so that
169 it works when argv[0] is a relative path.
170
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000171- Added a true unicode_internal_encode() function and fixed the
172 unicode_internal_decode function() to support Unicode objects directly
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000173 rather than by generating a copy of the object.
174
Tim Peters482c0212000-09-26 06:33:09 +0000175- Several of the internal Unicode tables are much smaller now, and
176 the source code should be much friendlier to weaker compilers.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000177
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000178
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000179Build and platform-specific issues
180
181- Better support of GNU Pth via --with-pth configure option.
182
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000183- Fix linker problems on Reliant UNIX.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000184
185- Changes for the benefit of SunOS 4.1.4 (really!). mmapmodule.c:
186 Don't define MS_SYNC to be zero when it is undefined. Added missing
187 prototypes in posixmodule.c.
188
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000189- Improved support for HP-UX build -- threads should now be correctly
190 configured (on HP-UX 10.20 and 11.00).
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000191
192
193What's new in 2.0 beta 1?
194=========================
195
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000196Source Incompatibilities
197------------------------
198
199None. Note that 1.6 introduced several incompatibilities with 1.5.2,
200such as single-argument append(), connect() and bind(), and changes to
201str(long) and repr(float).
202
203
204Binary Incompatibilities
205------------------------
206
207- Third party extensions built for Python 1.5.x or 1.6 cannot be used
208with Python 2.0; these extensions will have to be rebuilt for Python
2092.0.
210
211- On Windows, attempting to import a third party extension built for
212Python 1.5.x or 1.6 results in an immediate crash; there's not much we
213can do about this. Check your PYTHONPATH environment variable!
214
215- Python bytecode files (*.pyc and *.pyo) are not compatible between
216releases.
217
218
219Overview of Changes Since 1.6
220-----------------------------
221
222There are many new modules (including brand new XML support through
223the xml package, and i18n support through the gettext module); a list
224of all new modules is included below. Lots of bugs have been fixed.
225
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000226The process for making major new changes to the language has changed
227since Python 1.6. Enhancements must now be documented by a Python
228Enhancement Proposal (PEP) before they can be accepted.
229
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000230There are several important syntax enhancements, described in more
231detail below:
232
233 - Augmented assignment, e.g. x += 1
234
235 - List comprehensions, e.g. [x**2 for x in range(10)]
236
237 - Extended import statement, e.g. import Module as Name
238
239 - Extended print statement, e.g. print >> file, "Hello"
240
241Other important changes:
242
243 - Optional collection of cyclical garbage
244
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000245Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP)
246---------------------------------
247
248PEP stands for Python Enhancement Proposal. A PEP is a design
249document providing information to the Python community, or describing
250a new feature for Python. The PEP should provide a concise technical
251specification of the feature and a rationale for the feature.
252
253We intend PEPs to be the primary mechanisms for proposing new
254features, for collecting community input on an issue, and for
255documenting the design decisions that have gone into Python. The PEP
256author is responsible for building consensus within the community and
257documenting dissenting opinions.
258
259The PEPs are available at http://python.sourceforge.net/peps/.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000260
261Augmented Assignment
262--------------------
263
264This must have been the most-requested feature of the past years!
265Eleven new assignment operators were added:
266
Guido van Rossume905e952000-09-05 12:42:46 +0000267 += -= *= /= %= **= <<= >>= &= ^= |=
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000268
269For example,
270
271 A += B
272
273is similar to
274
275 A = A + B
276
277except that A is evaluated only once (relevant when A is something
278like dict[index].attr).
279
280However, if A is a mutable object, A may be modified in place. Thus,
281if A is a number or a string, A += B has the same effect as A = A+B
282(except A is only evaluated once); but if a is a list, A += B has the
283same effect as A.extend(B)!
284
285Classes and built-in object types can override the new operators in
286order to implement the in-place behavior; the not-in-place behavior is
287used automatically as a fallback when an object doesn't implement the
288in-place behavior. For classes, the method name is derived from the
289method name for the corresponding not-in-place operator by inserting
290an 'i' in front of the name, e.g. __iadd__ implements in-place
291__add__.
292
293Augmented assignment was implemented by Thomas Wouters.
294
295
296List Comprehensions
297-------------------
298
299This is a flexible new notation for lists whose elements are computed
300from another list (or lists). The simplest form is:
301
302 [<expression> for <variable> in <sequence>]
303
Guido van Rossum56db0952000-09-06 23:34:25 +0000304For example, [i**2 for i in range(4)] yields the list [0, 1, 4, 9].
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000305This is more efficient than a for loop with a list.append() call.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000306
307You can also add a condition:
308
309 [<expression> for <variable> in <sequence> if <condition>]
310
311For example, [w for w in words if w == w.lower()] would yield the list
312of words that contain no uppercase characters. This is more efficient
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000313than a for loop with an if statement and a list.append() call.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000314
315You can also have nested for loops and more than one 'if' clause. For
316example, here's a function that flattens a sequence of sequences::
317
318 def flatten(seq):
319 return [x for subseq in seq for x in subseq]
320
321 flatten([[0], [1,2,3], [4,5], [6,7,8,9], []])
322
323This prints
324
325 [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
326
327List comprehensions originated as a patch set from Greg Ewing; Skip
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000328Montanaro and Thomas Wouters also contributed. Described by PEP 202.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000329
330
331Extended Import Statement
332-------------------------
333
334Many people have asked for a way to import a module under a different
335name. This can be accomplished like this:
336
337 import foo
338 bar = foo
339 del foo
340
341but this common idiom gets old quickly. A simple extension of the
342import statement now allows this to be written as follows:
343
344 import foo as bar
345
346There's also a variant for 'from ... import':
347
348 from foo import bar as spam
349
350This also works with packages; e.g. you can write this:
351
352 import test.regrtest as regrtest
353
354Note that 'as' is not a new keyword -- it is recognized only in this
355context (this is only possible because the syntax for the import
356statement doesn't involve expressions).
357
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000358Implemented by Thomas Wouters. Described by PEP 221.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000359
360
361Extended Print Statement
362------------------------
363
364Easily the most controversial new feature, this extension to the print
365statement adds an option to make the output go to a different file
366than the default sys.stdout.
367
368For example, to write an error message to sys.stderr, you can now
369write:
370
371 print >> sys.stderr, "Error: bad dog!"
372
373As a special feature, if the expression used to indicate the file
374evaluates to None, the current value of sys.stdout used. Thus:
375
376 print >> None, "Hello world"
377
378is equivalent to
379
380 print "Hello world"
381
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000382Design and implementation by Barry Warsaw. Described by PEP 214.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000383
384
385Optional Collection of Cyclical Garbage
386---------------------------------------
387
388Python is now equipped with a garbage collector that can hunt down
389cyclical references between Python objects. It's no replacement for
390reference counting; in fact, it depends on the reference counts being
391correct, and decides that a set of objects belong to a cycle if all
392their reference counts can be accounted for from their references to
393each other. This devious scheme was first proposed by Eric Tiedemann,
394and brought to implementation by Neil Schemenauer.
395
396There's a module "gc" that lets you control some parameters of the
397garbage collection. There's also an option to the configure script
398that lets you enable or disable the garbage collection. In 2.0b1,
399it's on by default, so that we (hopefully) can collect decent user
400experience with this new feature. There are some questions about its
401performance. if it proves to be too much of a problem, we'll turn it
402off by default in the final 2.0 release.
403
404
405Smaller Changes
406---------------
407
408A new function zip() was added. zip(seq1, seq2, ...) is equivalent to
409map(None, seq1, seq2, ...) when the sequences have the same length;
410i.e. zip([1,2,3], [10,20,30]) returns [(1,10), (2,20), (3,30)]. When
411the lists are not all the same length, the shortest list wins:
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000412zip([1,2,3], [10,20]) returns [(1,10), (2,20)]. See PEP 201.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000413
414sys.version_info is a tuple (major, minor, micro, level, serial).
415
416Dictionaries have an odd new method, setdefault(key, default).
417dict.setdefault(key, default) returns dict[key] if it exists; if not,
418it sets dict[key] to default and returns that value. Thus:
419
420 dict.setdefault(key, []).append(item)
421
422does the same work as this common idiom:
423
424 if not dict.has_key(key):
425 dict[key] = []
426 dict[key].append(item)
427
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000428There are two new variants of SyntaxError that are raised for
429indentation-related errors: IndentationError and TabError.
430
431Changed \x to consume exactly two hex digits; see PEP 223. Added \U
432escape that consumes exactly eight hex digits.
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000433
434The limits on the size of expressions and file in Python source code
435have been raised from 2**16 to 2**32. Previous versions of Python
436were limited because the maximum argument size the Python VM accepted
437was 2**16. This limited the size of object constructor expressions,
438e.g. [1,2,3] or {'a':1, 'b':2}, and the size of source files. This
439limit was raised thanks to a patch by Charles Waldman that effectively
440fixes the problem. It is now much more likely that you will be
441limited by available memory than by an arbitrary limit in Python.
442
443The interpreter's maximum recursion depth can be modified by Python
444programs using sys.getrecursionlimit and sys.setrecursionlimit. This
445limit is the maximum number of recursive calls that can be made by
446Python code. The limit exists to prevent infinite recursion from
447overflowing the C stack and causing a core dump. The default value is
4481000. The maximum safe value for a particular platform can be found
449by running Misc/find_recursionlimit.py.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000450
451New Modules and Packages
452------------------------
453
454atexit - for registering functions to be called when Python exits.
455
456imputil - Greg Stein's alternative API for writing custom import
457hooks.
458
459pyexpat - an interface to the Expat XML parser, contributed by Paul
460Prescod.
461
462xml - a new package with XML support code organized (so far) in three
463subpackages: xml.dom, xml.sax, and xml.parsers. Describing these
464would fill a volume. There's a special feature whereby a
465user-installed package named _xmlplus overrides the standard
466xmlpackage; this is intended to give the XML SIG a hook to distribute
467backwards-compatible updates to the standard xml package.
468
469webbrowser - a platform-independent API to launch a web browser.
470
471
Guido van Rossume905e952000-09-05 12:42:46 +0000472Changed Modules
473---------------
474
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000475array -- new methods for array objects: count, extend, index, pop, and
476remove
477
478binascii -- new functions b2a_hex and a2b_hex that convert between
479binary data and its hex representation
480
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000481calendar -- Many new functions that support features including control
482over which day of the week is the first day, returning strings instead
483of printing them. Also new symbolic constants for days of week,
484e.g. MONDAY, ..., SUNDAY.
485
486cgi -- FieldStorage objects have a getvalue method that works like a
487dictionary's get method and returns the value attribute of the object.
488
489ConfigParser -- The parser object has new methods has_option,
490remove_section, remove_option, set, and write. They allow the module
491to be used for writing config files as well as reading them.
492
493ftplib -- ntransfercmd(), transfercmd(), and retrbinary() all now
Guido van Rossume905e952000-09-05 12:42:46 +0000494optionally support the RFC 959 REST command.
495
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000496gzip -- readline and readlines now accept optional size arguments
Guido van Rossume905e952000-09-05 12:42:46 +0000497
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000498httplib -- New interfaces and support for HTTP/1.1 by Greg Stein. See
499the module doc strings for details.
Guido van Rossum830ca2a2000-09-05 15:34:16 +0000500
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000501locale -- implement getdefaultlocale for Win32 and Macintosh
502
503marshal -- no longer dumps core when marshaling deeply nested or
504recursive data structures
505
506os -- new functions isatty, seteuid, setegid, setreuid, setregid
507
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000508os/popen2 -- popen2/popen3/popen4 support under Windows. popen2/popen3
509support under Unix.
510
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000511os/pty -- support for openpty and forkpty
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000512
513os.path -- fix semantics of os.path.commonprefix
514
515smtplib -- support for sending very long messages
516
517socket -- new function getfqdn()
518
519readline -- new functions to read, write and truncate history files.
520The readline section of the library reference manual contains an
521example.
522
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000523select -- add interface to poll system call
524
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000525shutil -- new copyfileobj function
526
527SimpleHTTPServer, CGIHTTPServer -- Fix problems with buffering in the
528HTTP server.
529
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000530Tkinter -- optimization of function flatten
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000531
532urllib -- scans environment variables for proxy configuration,
Tim Peters8b092332000-09-05 20:15:25 +0000533e.g. http_proxy.
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000534
535whichdb -- recognizes dumbdbm format
Guido van Rossume905e952000-09-05 12:42:46 +0000536
537
538Obsolete Modules
539----------------
540
541None. However note that 1.6 made a whole slew of modules obsolete:
542stdwin, soundex, cml, cmpcache, dircache, dump, find, grep, packmail,
543poly, zmod, strop, util, whatsound.
544
545
546Changed, New, Obsolete Tools
547----------------------------
548
Tim Peters8b092332000-09-05 20:15:25 +0000549None.
Guido van Rossume905e952000-09-05 12:42:46 +0000550
551
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000552C-level Changes
553---------------
554
555Several cleanup jobs were carried out throughout the source code.
556
557All C code was converted to ANSI C; we got rid of all uses of the
558Py_PROTO() macro, which makes the header files a lot more readable.
559
560Most of the portability hacks were moved to a new header file,
561pyport.h; several other new header files were added and some old
562header files were removed, in an attempt to create a more rational set
563of header files. (Few of these ever need to be included explicitly;
564they are all included by Python.h.)
565
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000566Trent Mick ensured portability to 64-bit platforms, under both Linux
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000567and Win64, especially for the new Intel Itanium processor. Mick also
568added large file support for Linux64 and Win64.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000569
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000570The C APIs to return an object's size have been update to consistently
571use the form PyXXX_Size, e.g. PySequence_Size and PyDict_Size. In
572previous versions, the abstract interfaces used PyXXX_Length and the
573concrete interfaces used PyXXX_Size. The old names,
574e.g. PyObject_Length, are still available for backwards compatibility
575at the API level, but are deprecated.
576
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000577The PyOS_CheckStack function has been implemented on Windows by
578Fredrik Lundh. It prevents Python from failing with a stack overflow
579on Windows.
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000580
581The GC changes resulted in creation of two new slots on object,
582tp_traverse and tp_clear. The augmented assignment changes result in
Guido van Rossum4338a282000-09-06 13:02:08 +0000583the creation of a new slot for each in-place operator.
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000584
585The GC API creates new requirements for container types implemented in
Guido van Rossum4338a282000-09-06 13:02:08 +0000586C extension modules. See Include/objimpl.h for details.
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000587
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000588PyErr_Format has been updated to automatically calculate the size of
589the buffer needed to hold the formatted result string. This change
590prevents crashes caused by programmer error.
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000591
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000592New C API calls: PyObject_AsFileDescriptor, PyErr_WriteUnraisable.
Guido van Rossume905e952000-09-05 12:42:46 +0000593
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000594PyRun_AnyFileEx, PyRun_SimpleFileEx, PyRun_FileEx -- New functions
595that are the same as their non-Ex counterparts except they take an
596extra flag argument that tells them to close the file when done.
597
598XXX There were other API changes that should be fleshed out here.
Guido van Rossumab9d6f01998-08-10 22:01:13 +0000599
Tim Peters8b092332000-09-05 20:15:25 +0000600
601Windows Changes
602---------------
603
604New popen2/popen3/peopen4 in os module (see Changed Modules above).
605
606os.popen is much more usable on Windows 95 and 98. See Microsoft
607Knowledge Base article Q150956. The Win9x workaround described there
608is implemented by the new w9xpopen.exe helper in the root of your
609Python installation. Note that Python uses this internally; it is not
610a standalone program.
611
612Administrator privileges are no longer required to install Python
613on Windows NT or Windows 2000. If you have administrator privileges,
614Python's registry info will be written under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.
615Otherwise the installer backs off to writing Python's registry info
Guido van Rossum4338a282000-09-06 13:02:08 +0000616under HKEY_CURRENT_USER. The latter is sufficient for all "normal"
Tim Peters8b092332000-09-05 20:15:25 +0000617uses of Python, but will prevent some advanced uses from working
618(for example, running a Python script as an NT service, or possibly
619from CGI).
620
621[This was new in 1.6] The installer no longer runs a separate Tcl/Tk
622installer; instead, it installs the needed Tcl/Tk files directly in the
623Python directory. If you already have a Tcl/Tk installation, this
624wastes some disk space (about 4 Megs) but avoids problems with
625conflicting Tcl/Tk installations, and makes it much easier for Python
626to ensure that Tcl/Tk can find all its files.
627
628[This was new in 1.6] The Windows installer now installs by default in
629\Python20\ on the default volume, instead of \Program Files\Python-2.0\.
630
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000631
632Updates to the changes between 1.5.2 and 1.6
633--------------------------------------------
634
635The 1.6 NEWS file can't be changed after the release is done, so here
636is some late-breaking news:
637
638New APIs in locale.py: normalize(), getdefaultlocale(), resetlocale(),
639and changes to getlocale() and setlocale().
640
641The new module is now enabled per default.
642
643It is not true that the encodings codecs cannot be used for normal
644strings: the string.encode() (which is also present on 8-bit strings
645!) allows using them for 8-bit strings too, e.g. to convert files from
646cp1252 (Windows) to latin-1 or vice-versa.
647
648Japanese codecs are available from Tamito KAJIYAMA:
649http://pseudo.grad.sccs.chukyo-u.ac.jp/~kajiyama/python/
650
651
Guido van Rossumab9d6f01998-08-10 22:01:13 +0000652======================================================================