| ===================================== |
| ==> Release 1.3 (13 October 1995) <== |
| ===================================== |
| |
| Major change |
| ============ |
| |
| Two words: Keyword Arguments. See the first section of Chapter 12 of |
| the Tutorial. |
| |
| (The rest of this file is textually the same as the remaining sections |
| of that chapter.) |
| |
| |
| Changes to the WWW and Internet tools |
| ===================================== |
| |
| The "htmllib" module has been rewritten in an incompatible fashion. |
| The new version is considerably more complete (HTML 2.0 except forms, |
| but including all ISO-8859-1 entity definitions), and easy to use. |
| Small changes to "sgmllib" have also been made, to better match the |
| tokenization of HTML as recognized by other web tools. |
| |
| A new module "formatter" has been added, for use with the new |
| "htmllib" module. |
| |
| The "urllib"and "httplib" modules have been changed somewhat to allow |
| overriding unknown URL types and to support authentication. They now |
| use "mimetools.Message" instead of "rfc822.Message" to parse headers. |
| The "endrequest()" method has been removed from the HTTP class since |
| it breaks the interaction with some servers. |
| |
| The "rfc822.Message" class has been changed to allow a flag to be |
| passed in that says that the file is unseekable. |
| |
| The "ftplib" module has been fixed to be (hopefully) more robust on |
| Linux. |
| |
| Several new operations that are optionally supported by servers have |
| been added to "nntplib": "xover", "xgtitle", "xpath" and "date". |
| |
| Other Language Changes |
| ====================== |
| |
| The "raise" statement now takes an optional argument which specifies |
| the traceback to be used when printing the exception's stack trace. |
| This must be a traceback object, such as found in "sys.exc_traceback". |
| When omitted or given as "None", the old behavior (to generate a stack |
| trace entry for the current stack frame) is used. |
| |
| The tokenizer is now more tolerant of alien whitespace. Control-L in |
| the leading whitespace of a line resets the column number to zero, |
| while Control-R just before the end of the line is ignored. |
| |
| Changes to Built-in Operations |
| ============================== |
| |
| For file objects, "f.read(0)" and "f.readline(0)" now return an empty |
| string rather than reading an unlimited number of bytes. For the |
| latter, omit the argument altogether or pass a negative value. |
| |
| A new system variable, "sys.platform", has been added. It specifies |
| the current platform, e.g. "sunos5" or "linux1". |
| |
| The built-in functions "input()" and "raw_input()" now use the GNU |
| readline library when it has been configured (formerly, only |
| interactive input to the interpreter itself was read using GNU |
| readline). The GNU readline library provides elaborate line editing |
| and history. The Python debugger ("pdb") is the first beneficiary of |
| this change. |
| |
| Two new built-in functions, "globals()" and "locals()", provide access |
| to dictionaries containming current global and local variables, |
| respectively. (These augment rather than replace "vars()", which |
| returns the current local variables when called without an argument, |
| and a module's global variables when called with an argument of type |
| module.) |
| |
| The built-in function "compile()" now takes a third possible value for |
| the kind of code to be compiled: specifying "'single'" generates code |
| for a single interactive statement, which prints the output of |
| expression statements that evaluate to something else than "None". |
| |
| Library Changes |
| =============== |
| |
| There are new module "ni" and "ihooks" that support importing modules |
| with hierarchical names such as "A.B.C". This is enabled by writing |
| "import ni; ni.ni()" at the very top of the main program. These |
| modules are amply documented in the Python source. |
| |
| The module "rexec" has been rewritten (incompatibly) to define a class |
| and to use "ihooks". |
| |
| The "string.split()" and "string.splitfields()" functions are now the |
| same function (the presence or absence of the second argument |
| determines which operation is invoked); similar for "string.join()" |
| and "string.joinfields()". |
| |
| The "Tkinter" module and its helper "Dialog" have been revamped to use |
| keyword arguments. Tk 4.0 is now the standard. A new module |
| "FileDialog" has been added which implements standard file selection |
| dialogs. |
| |
| The optional built-in modules "dbm" and "gdbm" are more coordinated |
| --- their "open()" functions now take the same values for their "flag" |
| argument, and the "flag" and "mode" argument have default values (to |
| open the database for reading only, and to create the database with |
| mode "0666" minuse the umask, respectively). The memory leaks have |
| finally been fixed. |
| |
| A new dbm-like module, "bsddb", has been added, which uses the BSD DB |
| package's hash method. |
| |
| A portable (though slow) dbm-clone, implemented in Python, has been |
| added for systems where none of the above is provided. It is aptly |
| dubbed "dumbdbm". |
| |
| The module "anydbm" provides a unified interface to "bsddb", "gdbm", |
| "dbm", and "dumbdbm", choosing the first one available. |
| |
| A new extension module, "binascii", provides a variety of operations |
| for conversion of text-encoded binary data. |
| |
| There are three new or rewritten companion modules implemented in |
| Python that can encode and decode the most common such formats: "uu" |
| (uuencode), "base64" and "binhex". |
| |
| A module to handle the MIME encoding quoted-printable has also been |
| added: "quopri". |
| |
| The parser module (which provides an interface to the Python parser's |
| abstract syntax trees) has been rewritten (incompatibly) by Fred |
| Drake. It now lets you change the parse tree and compile the result! |
| |
| The \code{syslog} module has been upgraded and documented. |
| |
| Other Changes |
| ============= |
| |
| The dynamic module loader recognizes the fact that different filenames |
| point to the same shared library and loads the library only once, so |
| you can have a single shared library that defines multiple modules. |
| (SunOS / SVR4 style shared libraries only.) |
| |
| Jim Fulton's ``abstract object interface'' has been incorporated into |
| the run-time API. For more detailes, read the files |
| "Include/abstract.h" and "Objects/abstract.c". |
| |
| The Macintosh version is much more robust now. |
| |
| Numerous things I have forgotten or that are so obscure no-one will |
| notice them anyway :-) |