Tim Peters | f553f89 | 2001-05-01 20:45:31 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1 | What's New in Python 2.2a0? |
| 2 | =========================== |
| 3 | |
| 4 | Core |
Tim Peters | a814db5 | 2001-05-14 07:05:58 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 5 | |
Marc-André Lemburg | 12e74b3 | 2001-05-22 08:58:23 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 6 | - The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now |
| 7 | only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then |
| 8 | only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a |
| 9 | leading BMO character). |
| 10 | |
Marc-André Lemburg | fab96cc | 2001-05-15 18:38:45 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 11 | - Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already |
| 12 | existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access |
| 13 | to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs. |
| 14 | |
| 15 | To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special |
| 16 | casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects |
| 17 | were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding). |
Tim Peters | eb28ef2 | 2001-06-02 05:27:19 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 18 | |
Marc-André Lemburg | fab96cc | 2001-05-15 18:38:45 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 19 | Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the |
| 20 | requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will |
| 21 | return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1") |
| 22 | will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs |
| 23 | for various simple to use conversions. |
| 24 | |
| 25 | New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode() |
| 26 | and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects): |
| 27 | |
| 28 | Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
| 29 | ---------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| 30 | uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
| 31 | base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
Guido van Rossum | c341580 | 2001-06-06 13:30:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 32 | quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
Marc-André Lemburg | fab96cc | 2001-05-15 18:38:45 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 33 | zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
| 34 | hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
| 35 | rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec |
| 36 | |
Mark Hammond | 2a0af79 | 2001-05-14 03:09:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 37 | - Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode |
| 38 | encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs' |
| 39 | as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium |
Guido van Rossum | 1bd797a | 2001-05-14 13:53:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 40 | term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than |
Mark Hammond | 2a0af79 | 2001-05-14 03:09:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 41 | 'mbcs'. |
Guido van Rossum | 1bd797a | 2001-05-14 13:53:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 42 | |
| 43 | On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for |
Mark Hammond | 2a0af79 | 2001-05-14 03:09:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 44 | functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python |
| 45 | string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for |
| 46 | the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's |
| 47 | default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing |
| 48 | it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python |
Tim Peters | a814db5 | 2001-05-14 07:05:58 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 49 | would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than |
| 50 | the default encoding for the file system. |
Guido van Rossum | 1bd797a | 2001-05-14 13:53:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 51 | |
Tim Peters | a814db5 | 2001-05-14 07:05:58 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 52 | In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with |
| 53 | Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect, |
| 54 | increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context. |
Mark Hammond | 2a0af79 | 2001-05-14 03:09:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 55 | See [????] for more details, including examples. |
Tim Peters | f553f89 | 2001-05-01 20:45:31 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 56 | |
Tim Peters | 61dff2b | 2001-05-08 15:43:37 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 57 | - Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full |
| 58 | precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a |
| 59 | .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the |
| 60 | 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754 |
| 61 | floating arithmetic, |
| 62 | |
| 63 | x = 9007199254740992.0 |
| 64 | print long(x) |
| 65 | |
| 66 | printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000 |
| 67 | if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using |
| 68 | str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal |
| 69 | now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full |
| 70 | machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion |
| 71 | functions are of good quality). |
| 72 | |
| 73 | This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and |
| 74 | usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable |
| 75 | algorithms to break. |
| 76 | |
Tim Peters | 2f228e7 | 2001-05-13 00:19:31 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 77 | - The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed |
| 78 | benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(), |
| 79 | dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a |
| 80 | given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should |
| 81 | rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the |
| 82 | order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a |
| 83 | dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new |
| 84 | sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted |
| 85 | order. |
| 86 | |
Tim Peters | 7a3bfc3 | 2001-06-12 01:22:22 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 87 | - Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster |
| 88 | operation along the most common code paths. |
| 89 | |
Guido van Rossum | 1031582 | 2001-05-01 20:54:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 90 | - Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means |
| 91 | the same as dict.has_key(x). |
| 92 | |
Barry Warsaw | 51acc8d | 2001-06-26 20:12:50 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 93 | - The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping |
| 94 | objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys() |
| 95 | and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example, |
| 96 | {}.update(UserDict()) |
| 97 | |
Guido van Rossum | 1031582 | 2001-05-01 20:54:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 98 | - Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values |
| 99 | to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter() |
| 100 | to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value |
| 101 | from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the |
| 102 | tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators |
| 103 | using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C). |
| 104 | Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys. |
| 105 | Iterating over a file generates its lines. |
| 106 | |
Tim Peters | f553f89 | 2001-05-01 20:45:31 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 107 | - The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator |
| 108 | arguments: |
Tim Peters | e63415e | 2001-05-08 04:38:29 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 109 | map(), filter(), reduce(), zip() |
Tim Peters | 8572b4f | 2001-05-06 01:05:02 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 110 | list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API) |
| 111 | max(), min() |
Tim Peters | 1af03e9 | 2001-05-26 19:37:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 112 | join() method of strings |
| 113 | extend() method of lists |
Tim Peters | 75f8e35 | 2001-05-05 11:33:43 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 114 | 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API) |
| 115 | operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API) |
Tim Peters | d6d010b | 2001-06-21 02:49:55 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 116 | right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as |
| 117 | x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values |
Tim Peters | 75f8e35 | 2001-05-05 11:33:43 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 118 | |
Tim Peters | d85e102 | 2001-05-11 21:51:48 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 119 | - Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example, |
| 120 | random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute). |
| 121 | |
Tim Peters | e63415e | 2001-05-08 04:38:29 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 122 | - Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even |
| 123 | if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==. |
| 124 | |
Tim Peters | 95bf939 | 2001-05-10 08:32:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 125 | - Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were |
| 126 | insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python |
| 127 | to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or |
| 128 | values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down. |
| 129 | |
Tim Peters | eb28ef2 | 2001-06-02 05:27:19 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 130 | - Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help |
| 131 | dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict |
Tim Peters | 7a3bfc3 | 2001-06-12 01:22:22 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 132 | d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x |
Tim Peters | eb28ef2 | 2001-06-02 05:27:19 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 133 | faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and |
| 134 | the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never). |
Tim Peters | 15d4929 | 2001-05-27 07:39:22 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 135 | |
Tim Peters | 52e155e | 2001-06-16 05:42:57 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 136 | - repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple). |
| 137 | |
| 138 | |
Tim Peters | a814db5 | 2001-05-14 07:05:58 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 139 | Library |
| 140 | |
Guido van Rossum | c7e4aca | 2001-07-12 11:54:37 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 141 | - Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This |
| 142 | provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition, |
| 143 | Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based, |
| 144 | one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation. |
| 145 | |
Guido van Rossum | 643d391 | 2001-07-05 14:46:25 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 146 | - The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing, |
| 147 | repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist() |
| 148 | method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260. |
| 149 | |
Martin v. Löwis | ebf94db | 2001-06-06 06:25:40 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 150 | - A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added. |
| 151 | |
Barry Warsaw | ffd674d | 2001-05-22 16:00:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 152 | - calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale. |
| 153 | |
Guido van Rossum | 2e0a654 | 2001-05-15 02:14:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 154 | - strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6), |
| 155 | and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items |
| 156 | that are still imported into string.py). |
| 157 | |
Tim Peters | a814db5 | 2001-05-14 07:05:58 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 158 | - Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings. |
| 159 | |
| 160 | - pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects. |
| 161 | Now it does. |
| 162 | |
Tim Peters | 95b3f78 | 2001-05-14 18:39:41 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 163 | - pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict). |
| 164 | |
Tim Peters | 7b9542a | 2001-06-10 23:40:19 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 165 | - New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C |
| 166 | types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In |
| 167 | native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports |
| 168 | these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config |
| 169 | process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types. |
Tim Peters | 7a3bfc3 | 2001-06-12 01:22:22 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 170 | In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are |
| 171 | 8-byte integral types. |
Tim Peters | 7b9542a | 2001-06-10 23:40:19 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 172 | |
Guido van Rossum | 83213cc | 2001-06-12 16:48:52 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 173 | - The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes |
| 174 | pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help', |
| 175 | it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or |
| 176 | 'help(object)'. |
| 177 | |
Tim Peters | a814db5 | 2001-05-14 07:05:58 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 178 | Tests |
| 179 | |
| 180 | - New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value |
| 181 | comparison operators mutute the dicts randomly during comparison. This |
| 182 | rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint |
| 183 | of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!). |
| 184 | |
| 185 | - New test_pprint.py verfies that pprint.isrecursive() and |
Tim Peters | 95b3f78 | 2001-05-14 18:39:41 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 186 | pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple |
| 187 | cases produce correct output. |
Tim Peters | a814db5 | 2001-05-14 07:05:58 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 188 | |
Tim Peters | 58e0a8c | 2001-05-14 22:32:33 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 189 | New platforms |
| 190 | |
| 191 | - Python should compile and run out of the box using the Borland C |
| 192 | compiler (under Windows), thanks to Stephen Hansen. |
Tim Peters | f553f89 | 2001-05-01 20:45:31 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 193 | |
Tim Peters | 4324aa3 | 2001-05-28 22:30:08 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 194 | C API |
| 195 | |
| 196 | - Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal |
| 197 | _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating. |
| 198 | |
| 199 | |
Guido van Rossum | ffe13be | 2001-04-16 18:46:45 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 200 | What's New in Python 2.1 (final)? |
| 201 | ================================= |
| 202 | |
| 203 | We only changed a few things since the last release candidate, all in |
| 204 | Python library code: |
| 205 | |
| 206 | - A bug in the locale module was fixed that affected locales which |
| 207 | define no grouping for numeric formatting. |
| 208 | |
| 209 | - A few bugs in the weakref module's implementations of weak |
| 210 | dictionaries (WeakValueDictionary and WeakKeyDictionary) were fixed, |
| 211 | and the test suite was updated to check for these bugs. |
| 212 | |
| 213 | - An old bug in the os.path.walk() function (introduced in Python |
| 214 | 2.0!) was fixed: a non-existent file would cause an exception |
| 215 | instead of being ignored. |
| 216 | |
| 217 | - Fixed a few bugs in the new symtable module found by Neil Norwitz's |
| 218 | PyChecker. |
| 219 | |
| 220 | |
Guido van Rossum | 5b08f13 | 2001-04-16 02:05:23 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 221 | What's New in Python 2.1c2? |
| 222 | =========================== |
Barry Warsaw | 11e89c7 | 2001-04-11 20:37:57 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 223 | |
Guido van Rossum | 5b08f13 | 2001-04-16 02:05:23 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 224 | A flurry of small changes, and one showstopper fixed in the nick of |
| 225 | time made it necessary to release another release candidate. The list |
| 226 | here is the *complete* list of patches (except version updates): |
Guido van Rossum | 4fb6036 | 2001-04-13 00:46:14 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 227 | |
Guido van Rossum | 5b08f13 | 2001-04-16 02:05:23 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 228 | Core |
Guido van Rossum | 4fb6036 | 2001-04-13 00:46:14 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 229 | |
Guido van Rossum | 5b08f13 | 2001-04-16 02:05:23 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 230 | - Tim discovered a nasty bug in the dictionary code, caused by |
| 231 | PyDict_Next() calling dict_resize(), and the GC code's use of |
| 232 | PyDict_Next() violating an assumption in dict_items(). This was |
| 233 | fixed with considerable amounts of band-aid, but the net effect is a |
| 234 | saner and more robust implementation. |
| 235 | |
| 236 | - Made a bunch of symbols static that were accidentally global. |
| 237 | |
| 238 | Build and Ports |
| 239 | |
| 240 | - The setup.py script didn't check for a new enough version of zlib |
| 241 | (1.1.3 is needed). Now it does. |
| 242 | |
| 243 | - Changed "make clean" target to also remove shared libraries. |
| 244 | |
| 245 | - Added a more general warning about the SGI Irix optimizer to README. |
| 246 | |
| 247 | Library |
| 248 | |
| 249 | - Fix a bug in urllib.basejoin("http://host", "../file.html") which |
| 250 | omitted the slash between host and file.html. |
| 251 | |
| 252 | - The mailbox module's _Mailbox class contained a completely broken |
| 253 | and undocumented seek() method. Ripped it out. |
| 254 | |
| 255 | - Fixed a bunch of typos in various library modules (urllib2, smtpd, |
| 256 | sgmllib, netrc, chunk) found by Neil Norwitz's PyChecker. |
| 257 | |
| 258 | - Fixed a few last-minute bugs in unittest. |
| 259 | |
| 260 | Extensions |
| 261 | |
| 262 | - Reverted the patch to the OpenSSL code in socketmodule.c to support |
| 263 | RAND_status() and the EGD, and the subsequent patch that tried to |
| 264 | fix it for pre-0.9.5 versions; the problem with the patch is that on |
| 265 | some systems it issues a warning whenever socket is imported, and |
| 266 | that's unacceptable. |
| 267 | |
| 268 | Tests |
| 269 | |
| 270 | - Fixed the pickle tests to work with "import test.test_pickle". |
| 271 | |
| 272 | - Tweaked test_locale.py to actually run the test Windows. |
| 273 | |
| 274 | - In distutils/archive_util.py, call zipfile.ZipFile() with mode "w", |
| 275 | not "wb" (which is not a valid mode at all). |
| 276 | |
| 277 | - Fix pstats browser crashes. Import readline if it exists to make |
| 278 | the user interface nicer. |
| 279 | |
| 280 | - Add "import thread" to the top of test modules that import the |
| 281 | threading module (test_asynchat and test_threadedtempfile). This |
| 282 | prevents test failures caused by a broken threading module resulting |
| 283 | from a previously caught failed import. |
| 284 | |
| 285 | - Changed test_asynchat.py to set the SO_REUSEADDR option; this was |
| 286 | needed on some platforms (e.g. Solaris 8) when the tests are run |
| 287 | twice in succession. |
| 288 | |
| 289 | - Skip rather than fail test_sunaudiodev if no audio device is found. |
| 290 | |
| 291 | |
| 292 | What's New in Python 2.1c1? |
| 293 | =========================== |
| 294 | |
| 295 | This list was significantly updated when 2.1c2 was released; the 2.1c1 |
| 296 | release didn't mention most changes that were actually part of 2.1c1: |
| 297 | |
| 298 | Legal |
| 299 | |
| 300 | - Copyright was assigned to the Python Software Foundation (PSF) and a |
| 301 | PSF license (very similar to the CNRI license) was added. |
| 302 | |
| 303 | - The CNRI copyright notice was updated to include 2001. |
| 304 | |
| 305 | Core |
Barry Warsaw | 11e89c7 | 2001-04-11 20:37:57 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 306 | |
Guido van Rossum | c993272 | 2001-04-12 02:31:27 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 307 | - After a public outcry, assignment to __debug__ is no longer illegal; |
| 308 | instead, a warning is issued. It will become illegal in 2.2. |
| 309 | |
Guido van Rossum | 5b08f13 | 2001-04-16 02:05:23 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 310 | - Fixed a core dump with "%#x" % 0, and changed the semantics so that |
| 311 | "%#x" now always prepends "0x", even if the value is zero. |
| 312 | |
| 313 | - Fixed some nits in the bytecode compiler. |
| 314 | |
| 315 | - Fixed core dumps when calling certain kinds of non-functions. |
| 316 | |
| 317 | - Fixed various core dumps caused by reference count bugs. |
| 318 | |
| 319 | Build and Ports |
| 320 | |
| 321 | - Use INSTALL_SCRIPT to install script files. |
| 322 | |
Guido van Rossum | 34d37dc | 2001-04-11 21:03:32 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 323 | - New port: SCO Unixware 7, by Billy G. Allie. |
| 324 | |
Guido van Rossum | 5b08f13 | 2001-04-16 02:05:23 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 325 | - Updated RISCOS port. |
| 326 | |
| 327 | - Updated BeOS port and notes. |
| 328 | |
| 329 | - Various other porting problems resolved. |
| 330 | |
| 331 | Library |
| 332 | |
| 333 | - The TERMIOS and SOCKET modules are now truly obsolete and |
| 334 | unnecessary. Their symbols are incorporated in the termios and |
| 335 | socket modules. |
| 336 | |
| 337 | - Fixed some 64-bit bugs in pickle, cPickle, and struct, and added |
| 338 | better tests for pickling. |
| 339 | |
| 340 | - threading: make Condition.wait() robust against KeyboardInterrupt. |
| 341 | |
| 342 | - zipfile: add support to zipfile to support opening an archive |
| 343 | represented by an open file rather than a file name. Fix bug where |
| 344 | the archive was not properly closed. Fixed a bug in this bugfix |
| 345 | where flush() was called for a read-only file. |
| 346 | |
| 347 | - imputil: added an uninstall() method to the ImportManager. |
| 348 | |
| 349 | - Canvas: fixed bugs in lower() and tkraise() methods. |
| 350 | |
| 351 | - SocketServer: API change (added overridable close_request() method) |
| 352 | so that the TCP server can explicitly close the request. |
| 353 | |
| 354 | - pstats: Eric Raymond added a simple interactive statistics browser, |
| 355 | invoked when the module is run as a script. |
| 356 | |
| 357 | - locale: fixed a problem in format(). |
| 358 | |
| 359 | - webbrowser: made it work when the BROWSER environment variable has a |
| 360 | value like "/usr/bin/netscape". Made it auto-detect Konqueror for |
| 361 | KDE 2. Fixed some other nits. |
| 362 | |
| 363 | - unittest: changes to allow using a different exception than |
| 364 | AssertionError, and added a few more function aliases. Some other |
| 365 | small changes. |
| 366 | |
| 367 | - urllib, urllib2: fixed redirect problems and a coupleof other nits. |
| 368 | |
| 369 | - asynchat: fixed a critical bug in asynchat that slipped through the |
| 370 | 2.1b2 release. Fixed another rare bug. |
| 371 | |
| 372 | - Fix some unqualified except: clauses (always a bad code example). |
| 373 | |
| 374 | XML |
| 375 | |
| 376 | - pyexpat: new API get_version_string(). |
| 377 | |
| 378 | - Fixed some minidom bugs. |
| 379 | |
| 380 | Extensions |
| 381 | |
| 382 | - Fixed a core dump in _weakref. Removed the weakref.mapping() |
| 383 | function (it adds nothing to the API). |
| 384 | |
| 385 | - Rationalized the use of header files in the readline module, to make |
| 386 | it compile (albeit with some warnings) with the very recent readline |
| 387 | 4.2, without breaking for earlier versions. |
| 388 | |
| 389 | - Hopefully fixed a buffering problem in linuxaudiodev. |
| 390 | |
| 391 | - Attempted a fix to make the OpenSSL support in the socket module |
| 392 | work again with pre-0.9.5 versions of OpenSSL. |
| 393 | |
| 394 | Tests |
| 395 | |
| 396 | - Added a test case for asynchat and asyncore. |
| 397 | |
| 398 | - Removed coupling between tests where one test failing could break |
| 399 | another. |
| 400 | |
| 401 | Tools |
| 402 | |
| 403 | - Ping added an interactive help browser to pydoc, fixed some nits |
| 404 | in the rest of the pydoc code, and added some features to his |
| 405 | inspect module. |
| 406 | |
| 407 | - An updated python-mode.el version 4.1 which integrates Ken |
| 408 | Manheimer's pdbtrack.el. This makes debugging Python code via pdb |
| 409 | much nicer in XEmacs and Emacs. When stepping through your program |
| 410 | with pdb, in either the shell window or the *Python* window, the |
| 411 | source file and line will be tracked by an arrow. Very cool! |
| 412 | |
| 413 | - IDLE: syntax warnings in interactive mode are changed into errors. |
| 414 | |
| 415 | - Some improvements to Tools/webchecker (ignore some more URL types, |
Tim Peters | 0e57abf | 2001-05-02 07:39:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 416 | follow some more links). |
Guido van Rossum | 5b08f13 | 2001-04-16 02:05:23 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 417 | |
| 418 | - Brought the Tools/compiler package up to date. |
Guido van Rossum | 34d37dc | 2001-04-11 21:03:32 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 419 | |
Barry Warsaw | 11e89c7 | 2001-04-11 20:37:57 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 420 | |
Martin v. Löwis | 0411f6f | 2001-03-21 08:01:39 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 421 | What's New in Python 2.1 beta 2? |
| 422 | ================================ |
| 423 | |
Guido van Rossum | 053ae35 | 2001-03-22 14:17:21 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 424 | (Unlisted are many fixed bugs, more documentation, etc.) |
| 425 | |
Martin v. Löwis | 0411f6f | 2001-03-21 08:01:39 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 426 | Core language, builtins, and interpreter |
| 427 | |
Guido van Rossum | 053ae35 | 2001-03-22 14:17:21 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 428 | - The nested scopes work (enabled by "from __future__ import |
| 429 | nested_scopes") is completed; in particular, the future now extends |
| 430 | into code executed through exec, eval() and execfile(), and into the |
| 431 | interactive interpreter. |
| 432 | |
| 433 | - When calling a base class method (e.g. BaseClass.__init__(self)), |
| 434 | this is now allowed even if self is not strictly spoken a class |
| 435 | instance (e.g. when using metaclasses or the Don Beaudry hook). |
| 436 | |
| 437 | - Slice objects are now comparable but not hashable; this prevents |
| 438 | dict[:] from being accepted but meaningless. |
| 439 | |
| 440 | - Complex division is now calculated using less braindead algorithms. |
| 441 | This doesn't change semantics except it's more likely to give useful |
| 442 | results in extreme cases. Complex repr() now uses full precision |
| 443 | like float repr(). |
| 444 | |
| 445 | - sgmllib.py now calls handle_decl() for simple <!...> declarations. |
| 446 | |
Jeremy Hylton | f626db7 | 2001-03-23 14:18:27 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 447 | - It is illegal to assign to the name __debug__, which is set when the |
| 448 | interpreter starts. It is effectively a compile-time constant. |
| 449 | |
| 450 | - A warning will be issued if a global statement for a variable |
| 451 | follows a use or assignment of that variable. |
| 452 | |
Martin v. Löwis | 0411f6f | 2001-03-21 08:01:39 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 453 | Standard library |
| 454 | |
Guido van Rossum | 053ae35 | 2001-03-22 14:17:21 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 455 | - unittest.py, a unit testing framework by Steve Purcell (PyUNIT, |
| 456 | inspired by JUnit), is now part of the standard library. You now |
| 457 | have a choice of two testing frameworks: unittest requires you to |
| 458 | write testcases as separate code, doctest gathers them from |
| 459 | docstrings. Both approaches have their advantages and |
| 460 | disadvantages. |
| 461 | |
| 462 | - A new module Tix was added, which wraps the Tix extension library |
| 463 | for Tk. With that module, it is not necessary to statically link |
| 464 | Tix with _tkinter, since Tix will be loaded with Tcl's "package |
| 465 | require" command. See Demo/tix/. |
| 466 | |
| 467 | - tzparse.py is now obsolete. |
| 468 | |
| 469 | - In gzip.py, the seek() and tell() methods are removed -- they were |
| 470 | non-functional anyway, and it's better if callers can test for their |
| 471 | existence with hasattr(). |
| 472 | |
| 473 | Python/C API |
| 474 | |
| 475 | - PyDict_Next(): it is now safe to call PyDict_SetItem() with a key |
| 476 | that's already in the dictionary during a PyDict_Next() iteration. |
| 477 | This used to fail occasionally when a dictionary resize operation |
| 478 | could be triggered that would rehash all the keys. All other |
| 479 | modifications to the dictionary are still off-limits during a |
| 480 | PyDict_Next() iteration! |
| 481 | |
| 482 | - New extended APIs related to passing compiler variables around. |
| 483 | |
| 484 | - New abstract APIs PyObject_IsInstance(), PyObject_IsSubclass() |
| 485 | implement isinstance() and issubclass(). |
| 486 | |
| 487 | - Py_BuildValue() now has a "D" conversion to create a Python complex |
| 488 | number from a Py_complex C value. |
Martin v. Löwis | 0411f6f | 2001-03-21 08:01:39 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 489 | |
Fred Drake | 4e262a9 | 2001-03-22 18:26:47 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 490 | - Extensions types which support weak references must now set the |
| 491 | field allocated for the weak reference machinery to NULL themselves; |
| 492 | this is done to avoid the cost of checking each object for having a |
| 493 | weakly referencable type in PyObject_INIT(), since most types are |
| 494 | not weakly referencable. |
| 495 | |
Jeremy Hylton | f626db7 | 2001-03-23 14:18:27 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 496 | - PyFrame_FastToLocals() and PyFrame_LocalsToFast() copy bindings for |
| 497 | free variables and cell variables to and from the frame's f_locals. |
| 498 | |
| 499 | - Variants of several functions defined in pythonrun.h have been added |
| 500 | to support the nested_scopes future statement. The variants all end |
| 501 | in Flags and take an extra argument, a PyCompilerFlags *; examples: |
| 502 | PyRun_AnyFileExFlags(), PyRun_InteractiveLoopFlags(). These |
| 503 | variants may be removed in Python 2.2, when nested scopes are |
Tim Peters | 0e57abf | 2001-05-02 07:39:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 504 | mandatory. |
Jeremy Hylton | f626db7 | 2001-03-23 14:18:27 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 505 | |
Andrew M. Kuchling | 8e9972c | 2001-03-22 15:42:08 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 506 | Distutils |
| 507 | |
| 508 | - the sdist command now writes a PKG-INFO file, as described in PEP 241, |
| 509 | into the release tree. |
| 510 | |
Tim Peters | 0e57abf | 2001-05-02 07:39:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 511 | - several enhancements to the bdist_wininst command from Thomas Heller |
Andrew M. Kuchling | 8e9972c | 2001-03-22 15:42:08 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 512 | (an uninstaller, more customization of the installer's display) |
| 513 | |
| 514 | - from Jack Jansen: added Mac-specific code to generate a dialog for |
| 515 | users to specify the command-line (because providing a command-line with |
Tim Peters | 0e57abf | 2001-05-02 07:39:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 516 | MacPython is awkward). Jack also made various fixes for the Mac |
Andrew M. Kuchling | 8e9972c | 2001-03-22 15:42:08 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 517 | and the Metrowerks compiler. |
Tim Peters | 0e57abf | 2001-05-02 07:39:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 518 | |
| 519 | - added 'platforms' and 'keywords' to the set of metadata that can be |
| 520 | specified for a distribution. |
Andrew M. Kuchling | 8e9972c | 2001-03-22 15:42:08 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 521 | |
| 522 | - applied patches from Jason Tishler to make the compiler class work with |
| 523 | Cygwin. |
| 524 | |
| 525 | |
Tim Peters | 2fe289a | 2001-03-01 22:19:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 526 | What's New in Python 2.1 beta 1? |
| 527 | ================================ |
Tim Peters | d66595f | 2001-02-04 03:09:53 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 528 | |
| 529 | Core language, builtins, and interpreter |
| 530 | |
Guido van Rossum | 9d0fbde | 2001-03-02 14:00:32 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 531 | - Following an outcry from the community about the amount of code |
| 532 | broken by the nested scopes feature introduced in 2.1a2, we decided |
| 533 | to make this feature optional, and to wait until Python 2.2 (or at |
| 534 | least 6 months) to make it standard. The option can be enabled on a |
| 535 | per-module basis by adding "from __future__ import nested_scopes" at |
| 536 | the beginning of a module (before any other statements, but after |
| 537 | comments and an optional docstring). See PEP 236 (Back to the |
| 538 | __future__) for a description of the __future__ statement. PEP 227 |
| 539 | (Statically Nested Scopes) has been updated to reflect this change, |
| 540 | and to clarify the semantics in a number of endcases. |
| 541 | |
| 542 | - The nested scopes code, when enabled, has been hardened, and most |
| 543 | bugs and memory leaks in it have been fixed. |
| 544 | |
| 545 | - Compile-time warnings are now generated for a number of conditions |
| 546 | that will break or change in meaning when nested scopes are enabled: |
| 547 | |
| 548 | - Using "from...import *" or "exec" without in-clause in a function |
| 549 | scope that also defines a lambda or nested function with one or |
| 550 | more free (non-local) variables. The presence of the import* or |
| 551 | bare exec makes it impossible for the compiler to determine the |
| 552 | exact set of local variables in the outer scope, which makes it |
| 553 | impossible to determine the bindings for free variables in the |
| 554 | inner scope. To avoid the warning about import *, change it into |
| 555 | an import of explicitly name object, or move the import* statement |
| 556 | to the global scope; to avoid the warning about bare exec, use |
| 557 | exec...in... (a good idea anyway -- there's a possibility that |
| 558 | bare exec will be deprecated in the future). |
| 559 | |
| 560 | - Use of a global variable in a nested scope with the same name as a |
| 561 | local variable in a surrounding scope. This will change in |
| 562 | meaning with nested scopes: the name in the inner scope will |
| 563 | reference the variable in the outer scope rather than the global |
| 564 | of the same name. To avoid the warning, either rename the outer |
| 565 | variable, or use a global statement in the inner function. |
| 566 | |
Neil Schemenauer | a35c688 | 2001-02-27 04:45:05 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 567 | - An optional object allocator has been included. This allocator is |
| 568 | optimized for Python objects and should be faster and use less memory |
| 569 | than the standard system allocator. It is not enabled by default |
| 570 | because of possible thread safety problems. The allocator is only |
| 571 | protected by the Python interpreter lock and it is possible that some |
| 572 | extension modules require a thread safe allocator. The object |
| 573 | allocator can be enabled by providing the "--with-pymalloc" option to |
| 574 | configure. |
| 575 | |
Tim Peters | d66595f | 2001-02-04 03:09:53 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 576 | Standard library |
| 577 | |
Martin v. Löwis | 2a5130e | 2001-02-27 04:21:58 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 578 | - pyexpat now detects the expat version if expat.h defines it. A |
| 579 | number of additional handlers are provided, which are only available |
| 580 | since expat 1.95. In addition, the methods SetParamEntityParsing and |
| 581 | GetInputContext of Parser objects are available with 1.95.x |
| 582 | only. Parser objects now provide the ordered_attributes and |
| 583 | specified_attributes attributes. A new module expat.model was added, |
| 584 | which offers a number of additional constants if 1.95.x is used. |
| 585 | |
| 586 | - xml.dom offers the new functions registerDOMImplementation and |
| 587 | getDOMImplementation. |
| 588 | |
| 589 | - xml.dom.minidom offers a toprettyxml method. A number of DOM |
| 590 | conformance issues have been resolved. In particular, Element now |
| 591 | has an hasAttributes method, and the handling of namespaces was |
| 592 | improved. |
| 593 | |
Andrew M. Kuchling | d6a1d79 | 2001-02-28 21:05:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 594 | - Ka-Ping Yee contributed two new modules: inspect.py, a module for |
| 595 | getting information about live Python code, and pydoc.py, a module |
| 596 | for interactively converting docstrings to HTML or text. |
| 597 | Tools/scripts/pydoc, which is now automatically installed into |
Tim Peters | 1eff796 | 2001-03-01 02:31:33 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 598 | <prefix>/bin, uses pydoc.py to display documentation; try running |
Guido van Rossum | e3955a8 | 2001-03-02 14:05:59 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 599 | "pydoc -h" for instructions. "pydoc -g" pops up a small GUI that |
| 600 | lets you browse the module docstrings using a web browser. |
Andrew M. Kuchling | d6a1d79 | 2001-02-28 21:05:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 601 | |
Tim Peters | 1eff796 | 2001-03-01 02:31:33 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 602 | - New library module difflib.py, primarily packaging the SequenceMatcher |
| 603 | class at the heart of the popular ndiff.py file-comparison tool. |
| 604 | |
| 605 | - doctest.py (a framework for verifying Python code examples in docstrings) |
| 606 | is now part of the std library. |
| 607 | |
Tim Peters | d66595f | 2001-02-04 03:09:53 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 608 | Windows changes |
| 609 | |
Guido van Rossum | e3955a8 | 2001-03-02 14:05:59 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 610 | - A new entry in the Start menu, "Module Docs", runs "pydoc -g" -- a |
| 611 | small GUI that lets you browse the module docstrings using your |
| 612 | default web browser. |
| 613 | |
Tim Peters | 1eff796 | 2001-03-01 02:31:33 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 614 | - Import is now case-sensitive. PEP 235 (Import on Case-Insensitive |
| 615 | Platforms) is implemented. See |
| 616 | |
| 617 | http://python.sourceforge.net/peps/pep-0235.html |
| 618 | |
| 619 | for full details, especially the "Current Lower-Left Semantics" section. |
| 620 | The new Windows import rules are simpler than before: |
| 621 | |
| 622 | A. If the PYTHONCASEOK environment variable exists, same as |
| 623 | before: silently accept the first case-insensitive match of any |
| 624 | kind; raise ImportError if none found. |
| 625 | |
| 626 | B. Else search sys.path for the first case-sensitive match; raise |
| 627 | ImportError if none found. |
| 628 | |
| 629 | The same rules have been implented on other platforms with case- |
| 630 | insensitive but case-preserving filesystems too (including Cygwin, and |
| 631 | several flavors of Macintosh operating systems). |
Tim Peters | d66595f | 2001-02-04 03:09:53 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 632 | |
Tim Peters | 25a9ce3 | 2001-02-19 07:06:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 633 | - winsound module: Under Win9x, winsound.Beep() now attempts to simulate |
| 634 | what it's supposed to do (and does do under NT and 2000) via direct |
| 635 | port manipulation. It's unknown whether this will work on all systems, |
Tim Peters | 1eff796 | 2001-03-01 02:31:33 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 636 | but it does work on my Win98SE systems now and was known to be useless on |
Tim Peters | 25a9ce3 | 2001-02-19 07:06:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 637 | all Win9x systems before. |
| 638 | |
Tim Peters | 1eff796 | 2001-03-01 02:31:33 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 639 | - Build: Subproject _test (effectively) renamed to _testcapi. |
| 640 | |
Tim Peters | 2fe289a | 2001-03-01 22:19:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 641 | New platforms |
| 642 | |
| 643 | - 2.1 should compile and run out of the box under MacOS X, even using HFS+. |
| 644 | Thanks to Steven Majewski! |
| 645 | |
| 646 | - 2.1 should compile and run out of the box on Cygwin. Thanks to Jason |
| 647 | Tishler! |
| 648 | |
Guido van Rossum | 9089b27 | 2001-03-02 06:49:50 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 649 | - 2.1 contains new files and patches for RISCOS, thanks to Dietmar |
| 650 | Schwertberger! See RISCOS/README for more information -- it seems |
| 651 | that because of the bizarre filename conventions on RISCOS, no port |
| 652 | to that platform is easy. Note that the new variable os.endsep is |
| 653 | silently supported in order to make life easier on this platform, |
| 654 | but we don't advertise it because it's not worth for most folks to |
| 655 | care about RISCOS portability. |
| 656 | |
Tim Peters | 25a9ce3 | 2001-02-19 07:06:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 657 | |
Tim Peters | d7b5e88 | 2001-01-25 03:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 658 | What's New in Python 2.1 alpha 2? |
| 659 | ================================= |
Tim Peters | 40ead76 | 2001-01-27 05:35:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 660 | |
Tim Peters | d7b5e88 | 2001-01-25 03:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 661 | Core language, builtins, and interpreter |
| 662 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 4589bd8 | 2001-02-01 20:38:45 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 663 | - Scopes nest. If a name is used in a function or class, but is not |
| 664 | local, the definition in the nearest enclosing function scope will |
| 665 | be used. One consequence of this change is that lambda statements |
| 666 | could reference variables in the namespaces where the lambda is |
| 667 | defined. In some unusual cases, this change will break code. |
| 668 | |
| 669 | In all previous version of Python, names were resolved in exactly |
| 670 | three namespaces -- the local namespace, the global namespace, and |
Jeremy Hylton | d6b1cf9 | 2001-02-02 20:06:28 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 671 | the builtin namespace. According to this old definition, if a |
Jeremy Hylton | 4589bd8 | 2001-02-01 20:38:45 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 672 | function A is defined within a function B, the names bound in B are |
| 673 | not visible in A. The new rules make names bound in B visible in A, |
| 674 | unless A contains a name binding that hides the binding in B. |
| 675 | |
| 676 | Section 4.1 of the reference manual describes the new scoping rules |
| 677 | in detail. The test script in Lib/test/test_scope.py demonstrates |
| 678 | some of the effects of the change. |
| 679 | |
| 680 | The new rules will cause existing code to break if it defines nested |
| 681 | functions where an outer function has local variables with the same |
| 682 | name as globals or builtins used by the inner function. Example: |
| 683 | |
| 684 | def munge(str): |
| 685 | def helper(x): |
| 686 | return str(x) |
| 687 | if type(str) != type(''): |
| 688 | str = helper(str) |
| 689 | return str.strip() |
| 690 | |
| 691 | Under the old rules, the name str in helper() is bound to the |
| 692 | builtin function str(). Under the new rules, it will be bound to |
| 693 | the argument named str and an error will occur when helper() is |
| 694 | called. |
| 695 | |
Jeremy Hylton | d6b1cf9 | 2001-02-02 20:06:28 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 696 | - The compiler will report a SyntaxError if "from ... import *" occurs |
| 697 | in a function or class scope. The language reference has documented |
| 698 | that this case is illegal, but the compiler never checked for it. |
| 699 | The recent introduction of nested scope makes the meaning of this |
| 700 | form of name binding ambiguous. In a future release, the compiler |
| 701 | may allow this form when there is no possibility of ambiguity. |
| 702 | |
Tim Peters | 40ead76 | 2001-01-27 05:35:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 703 | - repr(string) is easier to read, now using hex escapes instead of octal, |
| 704 | and using \t, \n and \r instead of \011, \012 and \015 (respectively): |
| 705 | |
| 706 | >>> "\texample \r\n" + chr(0) + chr(255) |
| 707 | '\texample \r\n\x00\xff' # in 2.1 |
| 708 | '\011example \015\012\000\377' # in 2.0 |
| 709 | |
Moshe Zadka | 6af0ce0 | 2001-01-29 06:41:00 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 710 | - Functions are now compared and hashed by identity, not by value, since |
| 711 | the func_code attribute is writable. |
| 712 | |
Fred Drake | fb9d712 | 2001-02-01 20:00:40 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 713 | - Weak references (PEP 205) have been added. This involves a few |
| 714 | changes in the core, an extension module (_weakref), and a Python |
| 715 | module (weakref). The weakref module is the public interface. It |
| 716 | includes support for "explicit" weak references, proxy objects, and |
| 717 | mappings with weakly held values. |
| 718 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 0072d5a | 2001-02-01 22:53:15 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 719 | - A 'continue' statement can now appear in a try block within the body |
| 720 | of a loop. It is still not possible to use continue in a finally |
Tim Peters | 9ea17ac | 2001-02-02 05:57:15 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 721 | clause. |
Jeremy Hylton | 0072d5a | 2001-02-01 22:53:15 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 722 | |
Tim Peters | d7b5e88 | 2001-01-25 03:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 723 | Standard library |
| 724 | |
Barry Warsaw | 30dbd14 | 2001-01-31 22:14:01 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 725 | - mailbox.py now has a new class, PortableUnixMailbox which is |
| 726 | identical to UnixMailbox but uses a more portable scheme for |
| 727 | determining From_ separators. Also, the constructors for all the |
| 728 | classes in this module have a new optional `factory' argument, which |
| 729 | is a callable used when new message classes must be instantiated by |
| 730 | the next() method. |
| 731 | |
Tim Peters | d7b5e88 | 2001-01-25 03:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 732 | - random.py is now self-contained, and offers all the functionality of |
| 733 | the now-deprecated whrandom.py. See the docs for details. random.py |
| 734 | also supports new functions getstate() and setstate(), for saving |
Tim Peters | d52269b | 2001-01-25 06:23:18 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 735 | and restoring the internal state of the generator; and jumpahead(n), |
| 736 | for quickly forcing the internal state to be the same as if n calls to |
| 737 | random() had been made. The latter is particularly useful for multi- |
| 738 | threaded programs, creating one instance of the random.Random() class for |
| 739 | each thread, then using .jumpahead() to force each instance to use a |
| 740 | non-overlapping segment of the full period. |
Tim Peters | d7b5e88 | 2001-01-25 03:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 741 | |
Tim Peters | 0de88fc | 2001-02-01 04:59:18 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 742 | - random.py's seed() function is new. For bit-for-bit compatibility with |
| 743 | prior releases, use the whseed function instead. The new seed function |
| 744 | addresses two problems: (1) The old function couldn't produce more than |
| 745 | about 2**24 distinct internal states; the new one about 2**45 (the best |
| 746 | that can be done in the Wichmann-Hill generator). (2) The old function |
| 747 | sometimes produced identical internal states when passed distinct |
| 748 | integers, and there was no simple way to predict when that would happen; |
| 749 | the new one guarantees to produce distinct internal states for all |
| 750 | arguments in [0, 27814431486576L). |
| 751 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 4c4fda0 | 2001-02-02 03:29:24 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 752 | - The socket module now supports raw packets on Linux. The socket |
| 753 | family is AF_PACKET. |
| 754 | |
Tim Peters | 9ea17ac | 2001-02-02 05:57:15 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 755 | - test_capi.py is a start at running tests of the Python C API. The tests |
| 756 | are implemented by the new Modules/_testmodule.c. |
| 757 | |
Jeremy Hylton | d6b1cf9 | 2001-02-02 20:06:28 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 758 | - A new extension module, _symtable, provides provisional access to the |
| 759 | internal symbol table used by the Python compiler. A higher-level |
| 760 | interface will be added on top of _symtable in a future release. |
| 761 | |
Andrew M. Kuchling | debc352 | 2001-02-22 15:53:21 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 762 | - Removed the obsolete soundex module. |
| 763 | |
Martin v. Löwis | 2a5130e | 2001-02-27 04:21:58 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 764 | - xml.dom.minidom now uses the standard DOM exceptions. Node supports |
| 765 | the isSameNode method; NamedNodeMap the get method. |
| 766 | |
| 767 | - xml.sax.expatreader supports the lexical handler property; it |
| 768 | generates comment, startCDATA, and endCDATA events. |
| 769 | |
Tim Peters | ee826f8 | 2001-01-31 19:39:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 770 | Windows changes |
| 771 | |
| 772 | - Build procedure: the zlib project is built in a different way that |
| 773 | ensures the zlib header files used can no longer get out of synch with |
Tim Peters | 9ea17ac | 2001-02-02 05:57:15 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 774 | the zlib binary used. See PCbuild\readme.txt for details. Your old |
| 775 | zlib-related directories can be deleted; you'll need to download fresh |
| 776 | source for zlib and unpack it into a new directory. |
Tim Peters | ee826f8 | 2001-01-31 19:39:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 777 | |
Tim Peters | 9ea17ac | 2001-02-02 05:57:15 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 778 | - Build: New subproject _test for the benefit of test_capi.py (see above). |
| 779 | |
Tim Peters | b16c56f | 2001-02-02 21:24:51 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 780 | - Build: New subproject _symtable, for new DLL _symtable.pyd (a nascent |
| 781 | interface to some Python compiler internals). |
| 782 | |
| 783 | - Build: Subproject ucnhash is gone, since the code was folded into the |
Tim Peters | 9ea17ac | 2001-02-02 05:57:15 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 784 | unicodedata subproject. |
Tim Peters | d7b5e88 | 2001-01-25 03:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 785 | |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 786 | What's New in Python 2.1 alpha 1? |
| 787 | ================================= |
| 788 | |
| 789 | Core language, builtins, and interpreter |
| 790 | |
Marc-André Lemburg | ebb195b | 2001-01-20 10:34:52 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 791 | - There is a new Unicode companion to the PyObject_Str() API |
| 792 | called PyObject_Unicode(). It behaves in the same way as the |
| 793 | former, but assures that the returned value is an Unicode object |
| 794 | (applying the usual coercion if necessary). |
Marc-André Lemburg | ad7c98e | 2001-01-17 17:09:53 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 795 | |
Guido van Rossum | f98eda0 | 2001-01-17 15:54:45 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 796 | - The comparison operators support "rich comparison overloading" (PEP |
| 797 | 207). C extension types can provide a rich comparison function in |
| 798 | the new tp_richcompare slot in the type object. The cmp() function |
| 799 | and the C function PyObject_Compare() first try the new rich |
| 800 | comparison operators before trying the old 3-way comparison. There |
| 801 | is also a new C API PyObject_RichCompare() (which also falls back on |
| 802 | the old 3-way comparison, but does not constrain the outcome of the |
| 803 | rich comparison to a Boolean result). |
| 804 | |
| 805 | The rich comparison function takes two objects (at least one of |
| 806 | which is guaranteed to have the type that provided the function) and |
| 807 | an integer indicating the opcode, which can be Py_LT, Py_LE, Py_EQ, |
| 808 | Py_NE, Py_GT, Py_GE (for <, <=, ==, !=, >, >=), and returns a Python |
| 809 | object, which may be NotImplemented (in which case the tp_compare |
| 810 | slot function is used as a fallback, if defined). |
| 811 | |
| 812 | Classes can overload individual comparison operators by defining one |
| 813 | or more of the methods__lt__, __le__, __eq__, __ne__, __gt__, |
Guido van Rossum | a88479f | 2001-01-18 14:28:08 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 814 | __ge__. There are no explicit "reflected argument" versions of |
| 815 | these; instead, __lt__ and __gt__ are each other's reflection, |
| 816 | likewise for__le__ and __ge__; __eq__ and __ne__ are their own |
| 817 | reflection (similar at the C level). No other implications are |
| 818 | made; in particular, Python does not assume that == is the Boolean |
| 819 | inverse of !=, or that < is the Boolean inverse of >=. This makes |
| 820 | it possible to define types with partial orderings. |
Guido van Rossum | f98eda0 | 2001-01-17 15:54:45 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 821 | |
| 822 | Classes or types that want to implement (in)equality tests but not |
| 823 | the ordering operators (i.e. unordered types) should implement == |
| 824 | and !=, and raise an error for the ordering operators. |
| 825 | |
Guido van Rossum | a88479f | 2001-01-18 14:28:08 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 826 | It is possible to define types whose rich comparison results are not |
Guido van Rossum | f98eda0 | 2001-01-17 15:54:45 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 827 | Boolean; e.g. a matrix type might want to return a matrix of bits |
| 828 | for A < B, giving elementwise comparisons. Such types should ensure |
| 829 | that any interpretation of their value in a Boolean context raises |
| 830 | an exception, e.g. by defining __nonzero__ (or the tp_nonzero slot |
| 831 | at the C level) to always raise an exception. |
| 832 | |
Guido van Rossum | a88479f | 2001-01-18 14:28:08 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 833 | - Complex numbers use rich comparisons to define == and != but raise |
| 834 | an exception for <, <=, > and >=. Unfortunately, this also means |
| 835 | that cmp() of two complex numbers raises an exception when the two |
| 836 | numbers differ. Since it is not mathematically meaningful to compare |
| 837 | complex numbers except for equality, I hope that this doesn't break |
| 838 | too much code. |
| 839 | |
Tim Peters | 3389f19 | 2001-02-18 08:48:49 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 840 | - The outcome of comparing non-numeric objects of different types is |
Tim Peters | 1449585 | 2001-02-18 08:28:33 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 841 | not defined by the language, other than that it's arbitrary but |
| 842 | consistent (see the Reference Manual). An implementation detail changed |
| 843 | in 2.1a1 such that None now compares less than any other object. Code |
| 844 | relying on this new behavior (like code that relied on the previous |
| 845 | behavior) does so at its own risk. |
| 846 | |
Barry Warsaw | 573b541 | 2001-01-15 20:43:18 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 847 | - Functions and methods now support getting and setting arbitrarily |
| 848 | named attributes (PEP 232). Functions have a new __dict__ |
| 849 | (a.k.a. func_dict) which hold the function attributes. Methods get |
| 850 | and set attributes on their underlying im_func. It is a TypeError |
| 851 | to set an attribute on a bound method. |
| 852 | |
Guido van Rossum | 051e335 | 2001-01-15 19:11:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 853 | - The xrange() object implementation has been improved so that |
| 854 | xrange(sys.maxint) can be used on 64-bit platforms. There's still a |
| 855 | limitation that in this case len(xrange(sys.maxint)) can't be |
| 856 | calculated, but the common idiom "for i in xrange(sys.maxint)" will |
| 857 | work fine as long as the index i doesn't actually reach 2**31. |
| 858 | (Python uses regular ints for sequence and string indices; fixing |
| 859 | that is much more work.) |
| 860 | |
Guido van Rossum | 1cc8f83 | 2001-01-12 16:25:08 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 861 | - Two changes to from...import: |
| 862 | |
Guido van Rossum | ba38123 | 2001-02-03 15:06:40 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 863 | 1) "from M import X" now works even if (after loading module M) |
| 864 | sys.modules['M'] is not a real module; it's basically a getattr() |
| 865 | operation with AttributeError exceptions changed into ImportError. |
Guido van Rossum | 1cc8f83 | 2001-01-12 16:25:08 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 866 | |
| 867 | 2) "from M import *" now looks for M.__all__ to decide which names to |
| 868 | import; if M.__all__ doesn't exist, it uses M.__dict__.keys() but |
| 869 | filters out names starting with '_' as before. Whether or not |
| 870 | __all__ exists, there's no restriction on the type of M. |
| 871 | |
Guido van Rossum | f61f166 | 2001-01-10 20:13:55 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 872 | - File objects have a new method, xreadlines(). This is the fastest |
| 873 | way to iterate over all lines in a file: |
| 874 | |
| 875 | for line in file.xreadlines(): |
| 876 | ...do something to line... |
| 877 | |
| 878 | See the xreadlines module (mentioned below) for how to do this for |
| 879 | other file-like objects. |
| 880 | |
| 881 | - Even if you don't use file.xreadlines(), you may expect a speedup on |
| 882 | line-by-line input. The file.readline() method has been optimized |
Tim Peters | f29b64d | 2001-01-15 06:33:19 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 883 | quite a bit in platform-specific ways: on systems (like Linux) that |
| 884 | support flockfile(), getc_unlocked(), and funlockfile(), those are |
| 885 | used by default. On systems (like Windows) without getc_unlocked(), |
| 886 | a complicated (but still thread-safe) method using fgets() is used by |
| 887 | default. |
| 888 | |
Tim Peters | d52269b | 2001-01-25 06:23:18 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 889 | You can force use of the fgets() method by #define'ing |
| 890 | USE_FGETS_IN_GETLINE at build time (it may be faster than |
Tim Peters | f29b64d | 2001-01-15 06:33:19 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 891 | getc_unlocked()). |
| 892 | |
Tim Peters | d52269b | 2001-01-25 06:23:18 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 893 | You can force fgets() not to be used by #define'ing |
| 894 | DONT_USE_FGETS_IN_GETLINE (this is the first thing to try if std test |
Tim Peters | f29b64d | 2001-01-15 06:33:19 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 895 | test_bufio.py fails -- and let us know if it does!). |
| 896 | |
| 897 | - In addition, the fileinput module, while still slower than the other |
| 898 | methods on most platforms, has been sped up too, by using |
| 899 | file.readlines(sizehint). |
Guido van Rossum | f61f166 | 2001-01-10 20:13:55 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 900 | |
| 901 | - Support for run-time warnings has been added, including a new |
| 902 | command line option (-W) to specify the disposition of warnings. |
| 903 | See the description of the warnings module below. |
| 904 | |
| 905 | - Extensive changes have been made to the coercion code. This mostly |
| 906 | affects extension modules (which can now implement mixed-type |
| 907 | numerical operators without having to use coercion), but |
| 908 | occasionally, in boundary cases the coercion semantics have changed |
| 909 | 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] | 910 | is considered an improvement. Also note that __rcmp__ is no longer |
Guido van Rossum | f61f166 | 2001-01-10 20:13:55 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 911 | supported -- instead of calling __rcmp__, __cmp__ is called with |
Guido van Rossum | a88479f | 2001-01-18 14:28:08 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 912 | reflected arguments. |
Guido van Rossum | f61f166 | 2001-01-10 20:13:55 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 913 | |
Guido van Rossum | f98eda0 | 2001-01-17 15:54:45 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 914 | - In connection with the coercion changes, a new built-in singleton |
| 915 | object, NotImplemented is defined. This can be returned for |
| 916 | operations that wish to indicate they are not implemented for a |
| 917 | particular combination of arguments. From C, this is |
| 918 | Py_NotImplemented. |
| 919 | |
Martin v. Löwis | be4c0f5 | 2001-01-04 20:30:56 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 920 | - The interpreter accepts now bytecode files on the command line even |
| 921 | if they do not have a .pyc or .pyo extension. On Linux, after executing |
| 922 | |
Martin v. Löwis | e214baa | 2001-02-04 22:37:56 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 923 | import imp,sys,string |
| 924 | magic = string.join(["\\x%.2x" % ord(c) for c in imp.get_magic()],"") |
| 925 | reg = ':pyc:M::%s::%s:' % (magic, sys.executable) |
| 926 | open("/proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register","wb").write(reg) |
Martin v. Löwis | be4c0f5 | 2001-01-04 20:30:56 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 927 | |
| 928 | any byte code file can be used as an executable (i.e. as an argument |
| 929 | to execve(2)). |
| 930 | |
Tim Peters | 9940b80 | 2000-12-01 07:59:35 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 931 | - %[xXo] formats of negative Python longs now produce a sign |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 932 | character. In 1.6 and earlier, they never produced a sign, |
| 933 | and raised an error if the value of the long was too large |
| 934 | to fit in a Python int. In 2.0, they produced a sign if and |
| 935 | only if too large to fit in an int. This was inconsistent |
| 936 | across platforms (because the size of an int varies across |
| 937 | platforms), and inconsistent with hex() and oct(). Example: |
| 938 | |
| 939 | >>> "%x" % -0x42L |
Tim Peters | 9940b80 | 2000-12-01 07:59:35 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 940 | '-42' # in 2.1 |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 941 | 'ffffffbe' # in 2.0 and before, on 32-bit machines |
| 942 | >>> hex(-0x42L) |
| 943 | '-0x42L' # in all versions of Python |
| 944 | |
Tim Peters | 9940b80 | 2000-12-01 07:59:35 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 945 | The behavior of %d formats for negative Python longs remains |
| 946 | the same as in 2.0 (although in 1.6 and before, they raised |
| 947 | an error if the long didn't fit in a Python int). |
| 948 | |
| 949 | %u formats don't make sense for Python longs, but are allowed |
| 950 | and treated the same as %d in 2.1. In 2.0, a negative long |
| 951 | formatted via %u produced a sign if and only if too large to |
| 952 | fit in an int. In 1.6 and earlier, a negative long formatted |
| 953 | via %u raised an error if it was too big to fit in an int. |
| 954 | |
Guido van Rossum | 3661d39 | 2000-12-12 22:10:31 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 955 | - Dictionary objects have an odd new method, popitem(). This removes |
| 956 | an arbitrary item from the dictionary and returns it (in the form of |
| 957 | a (key, value) pair). This can be useful for algorithms that use a |
| 958 | dictionary as a bag of "to do" items and repeatedly need to pick one |
| 959 | item. Such algorithms normally end up running in quadratic time; |
| 960 | using popitem() they can usually be made to run in linear time. |
| 961 | |
Tim Peters | 36cdad1 | 2000-12-29 02:06:45 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 962 | Standard library |
| 963 | |
Thomas Wouters | fe38525 | 2001-01-19 23:16:56 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 964 | - In the time module, the time argument to the functions strftime, |
| 965 | localtime, gmtime, asctime and ctime is now optional, defaulting to |
| 966 | the current time (in the local timezone). |
| 967 | |
Guido van Rossum | da91f22 | 2001-01-15 16:36:08 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 968 | - The ftplib module now defaults to passive mode, which is deemed a |
| 969 | more useful default given that clients are often inside firewalls |
| 970 | these days. Note that this could break if ftplib is used to connect |
| 971 | to a *server* that is inside a firewall, from outside; this is |
| 972 | expected to be a very rare situation. To fix that, you can call |
| 973 | ftp.set_pasv(0). |
| 974 | |
Martin v. Löwis | 10a2787 | 2001-01-13 09:54:41 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 975 | - The module site now treats .pth files not only for path configuration, |
| 976 | but also supports extensions to the initialization code: Lines starting |
| 977 | with import are executed. |
| 978 | |
Guido van Rossum | f61f166 | 2001-01-10 20:13:55 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 979 | - There's a new module, warnings, which implements a mechanism for |
| 980 | issuing and filtering warnings. There are some new built-in |
| 981 | exceptions that serve as warning categories, and a new command line |
| 982 | option, -W, to control warnings (e.g. -Wi ignores all warnings, -We |
| 983 | turns warnings into errors). warnings.warn(message[, category]) |
| 984 | issues a warning message; this can also be called from C as |
| 985 | PyErr_Warn(category, message). |
| 986 | |
| 987 | - A new module xreadlines was added. This exports a single factory |
| 988 | function, xreadlines(). The intention is that this code is the |
| 989 | absolutely fastest way to iterate over all lines in an open |
| 990 | file(-like) object: |
| 991 | |
| 992 | import xreadlines |
| 993 | for line in xreadlines.xreadlines(file): |
| 994 | ...do something to line... |
| 995 | |
| 996 | This is equivalent to the previous the speed record holder using |
| 997 | file.readlines(sizehint). Note that if file is a real file object |
| 998 | (as opposed to a file-like object), this is equivalent: |
| 999 | |
| 1000 | for line in file.xreadlines(): |
| 1001 | ...do something to line... |
| 1002 | |
Tim Peters | 36cdad1 | 2000-12-29 02:06:45 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1003 | - The bisect module has new functions bisect_left, insort_left, |
| 1004 | bisect_right and insort_right. The old names bisect and insort |
| 1005 | are now aliases for bisect_right and insort_right. XXX_right |
| 1006 | and XXX_left methods differ in what happens when the new element |
| 1007 | compares equal to one or more elements already in the list: the |
| 1008 | 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] | 1009 | right. Code that doesn't care where equal elements end up should |
| 1010 | continue to use the old, short names ("bisect" and "insort"). |
Tim Peters | 36cdad1 | 2000-12-29 02:06:45 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1011 | |
Andrew M. Kuchling | f6f3a89 | 2001-01-13 14:53:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1012 | - The new curses.panel module wraps the panel library that forms part |
| 1013 | of SYSV curses and ncurses. Contributed by Thomas Gellekum. |
| 1014 | |
Guido van Rossum | f61f166 | 2001-01-10 20:13:55 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1015 | - The SocketServer module now sets the allow_reuse_address flag by |
| 1016 | default in the TCPServer class. |
| 1017 | |
| 1018 | - A new function, sys._getframe(), returns the stack frame pointer of |
| 1019 | the caller. This is intended only as a building block for |
| 1020 | higher-level mechanisms such as string interpolation. |
| 1021 | |
Martin v. Löwis | 2a5130e | 2001-02-27 04:21:58 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1022 | - The pyexpat module supports a number of new handlers, which are |
| 1023 | available only in expat 1.2. If invocation of a callback fails, it |
| 1024 | will report an additional frame in the traceback. Parser objects |
| 1025 | participate now in garbage collection. If expat reports an unknown |
| 1026 | encoding, pyexpat will try to use a Python codec; that works only |
| 1027 | for single-byte charsets. The parser type objects is exposed as |
| 1028 | XMLParserObject. |
| 1029 | |
| 1030 | - xml.dom now offers standard definitions for symbolic node type and |
| 1031 | exception code constants, and a hierarchy of DOM exceptions. minidom |
| 1032 | was adjusted to use them. |
| 1033 | |
| 1034 | - The conformance of xml.dom.minidom to the DOM specification was |
| 1035 | improved. It detects a number of additional error cases; the |
| 1036 | previous/next relationship works even when the tree is modified; |
| 1037 | Node supports the normalize() method; NamedNodeMap, DocumentType and |
| 1038 | DOMImplementation classes were added; Element supports the |
| 1039 | hasAttribute and hasAttributeNS methods; and Text supports the splitText |
| 1040 | method. |
| 1041 | |
Guido van Rossum | f61f166 | 2001-01-10 20:13:55 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1042 | Build issues |
| 1043 | |
Guido van Rossum | 1e33bdc | 2001-01-23 03:17:00 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1044 | - For Unix (and Unix-compatible) builds, configuration and building of |
| 1045 | extension modules is now greatly automated. Rather than having to |
| 1046 | edit the Modules/Setup file to indicate which modules should be |
| 1047 | built and where their include files and libraries are, a |
| 1048 | distutils-based setup.py script now takes care of building most |
| 1049 | extension modules. All extension modules built this way are built |
| 1050 | as shared libraries. Only a few modules that must be linked |
| 1051 | statically are still listed in the Setup file; you won't need to |
| 1052 | edit their configuration. |
| 1053 | |
| 1054 | - Python should now build out of the box on Cygwin. If it doesn't, |
| 1055 | mail to Jason Tishler (jlt63 at users.sourceforge.net). |
Guido van Rossum | f61f166 | 2001-01-10 20:13:55 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1056 | |
| 1057 | - Python now always uses its own (renamed) implementation of getopt() |
| 1058 | -- there's too much variation among C library getopt() |
| 1059 | implementations. |
| 1060 | |
| 1061 | - C++ compilers are better supported; the CXX macro is always set to a |
| 1062 | C++ compiler if one is found. |
Tim Peters | 36cdad1 | 2000-12-29 02:06:45 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1063 | |
Tim Peters | d92dfe0 | 2000-12-12 01:18:41 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1064 | Windows changes |
| 1065 | |
| 1066 | - select module: By default under Windows, a select() call |
| 1067 | can specify no more than 64 sockets. Python now boosts |
| 1068 | this Microsoft default to 512. If you need even more than |
| 1069 | that, see the MS docs (you'll need to #define FD_SETSIZE |
| 1070 | and recompile Python from source). |
| 1071 | |
Guido van Rossum | f61f166 | 2001-01-10 20:13:55 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1072 | - Support for Windows 3.1, DOS and OS/2 is gone. The Lib/dos-8x3 |
| 1073 | subdirectory is no more! |
| 1074 | |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1075 | |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1076 | What's New in Python 2.0? |
Fred Drake | 1a64050 | 2000-10-16 20:27:25 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1077 | ========================= |
Guido van Rossum | 6100033 | 1997-08-15 04:39:58 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1078 | |
Guido van Rossum | 8ed602b | 2000-09-01 22:34:33 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1079 | 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] | 1080 | changes are in the file HISTORY. If you are making the jump directly |
| 1081 | from Python 1.5.2 to 2.0, make sure to read the section for 1.6 in the |
| 1082 | HISTORY file! Many important changes listed there. |
Guido van Rossum | 6100033 | 1997-08-15 04:39:58 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1083 | |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1084 | Alternatively, a good overview of the changes between 1.5.2 and 2.0 is |
| 1085 | the document "What's New in Python 2.0" by Kuchling and Moshe Zadka: |
| 1086 | http://starship.python.net/crew/amk/python/writing/new-python/. |
Guido van Rossum | 1f83cce | 1997-10-06 21:04:35 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1087 | |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1088 | --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.pythonlabs.com/~guido/) |
Guido van Rossum | 437cfe8 | 1999-04-08 20:17:57 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1089 | |
| 1090 | ====================================================================== |
| 1091 | |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1092 | What's new in 2.0 (since release candidate 1)? |
| 1093 | ============================================== |
| 1094 | |
| 1095 | Standard library |
| 1096 | |
| 1097 | - The copy_reg module was modified to clarify its intended use: to |
| 1098 | register pickle support for extension types, not for classes. |
| 1099 | pickle() will raise a TypeError if it is passed a class. |
| 1100 | |
| 1101 | - Fixed a bug in gettext's "normalize and expand" code that prevented |
| 1102 | it from finding an existing .mo file. |
| 1103 | |
| 1104 | - Restored support for HTTP/0.9 servers in httplib. |
| 1105 | |
Tim Peters | 989b7b9 | 2000-10-16 20:24:53 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1106 | - The math module was changed to stop raising OverflowError in case of |
| 1107 | underflow, and return 0 instead in underflow cases. Whether Python |
| 1108 | used to raise OverflowError in case of underflow was platform- |
| 1109 | dependent (it did when the platform math library set errno to ERANGE |
| 1110 | on underflow). |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1111 | |
| 1112 | - Fixed a bug in StringIO that occurred when the file position was not |
| 1113 | at the end of the file and write() was called with enough data to |
| 1114 | extend past the end of the file. |
| 1115 | |
| 1116 | - Fixed a bug that caused Tkinter error messages to get lost on |
| 1117 | Windows. The bug was fixed by replacing direct use of |
| 1118 | interp->result with Tcl_GetStringResult(interp). |
| 1119 | |
| 1120 | - Fixed bug in urllib2 that caused it to fail when it received an HTTP |
| 1121 | redirect response. |
| 1122 | |
| 1123 | - Several changes were made to distutils: Some debugging code was |
| 1124 | removed from util. Fixed the installer used when an external zip |
| 1125 | program (like WinZip) is not found; the source code for this |
| 1126 | installer is in Misc/distutils. check_lib() was modified to behave |
| 1127 | more like AC_CHECK_LIB by add other_libraries() as a parameter. The |
| 1128 | test for whether installed modules are on sys.path was changed to |
| 1129 | use both normcase() and normpath(). |
| 1130 | |
Jeremy Hylton | d867a2c | 2000-10-16 20:41:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1131 | - Several minor bugs were fixed in the xml package (the minidom, |
| 1132 | pulldom, expatreader, and saxutils modules). |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1133 | |
| 1134 | - The regression test driver (regrtest.py) behavior when invoked with |
| 1135 | -l changed: It now reports a count of objects that are recognized as |
| 1136 | garbage but not freed by the garbage collector. |
| 1137 | |
Tim Peters | 989b7b9 | 2000-10-16 20:24:53 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1138 | - The regression test for the math module was changed to test |
| 1139 | exceptional behavior when the test is run in verbose mode. Python |
| 1140 | cannot yet guarantee consistent exception behavior across platforms, |
| 1141 | so the exception part of test_math is run only in verbose mode, and |
| 1142 | may fail on your platform. |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1143 | |
| 1144 | Internals |
| 1145 | |
| 1146 | - PyOS_CheckStack() has been disabled on Win64, where it caused |
| 1147 | test_sre to fail. |
| 1148 | |
| 1149 | Build issues |
| 1150 | |
| 1151 | - Changed compiler flags, so that gcc is always invoked with -Wall and |
| 1152 | -Wstrict-prototypes. Users compiling Python with GCC should see |
| 1153 | exactly one warning, except if they have passed configure the |
Tim Peters | 989b7b9 | 2000-10-16 20:24:53 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1154 | --with-pydebug flag. The expected warning is for getopt() in |
Tim Peters | adfb94f | 2000-10-16 20:51:33 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1155 | Modules/main.c. This warning will be fixed for Python 2.1. |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1156 | |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1157 | - Fixed configure to add -threads argument during linking on OSF1. |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1158 | |
| 1159 | Tools and other miscellany |
| 1160 | |
| 1161 | - The compiler in Tools/compiler was updated to support the new |
| 1162 | language features introduced in 2.0: extended print statement, list |
| 1163 | comprehensions, and augmented assignments. The new compiler should |
| 1164 | also be backwards compatible with Python 1.5.2; the compiler will |
| 1165 | always generate code for the version of the interpreter it runs |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1166 | under. |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1167 | |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1168 | What's new in 2.0 release candidate 1 (since beta 2)? |
| 1169 | ===================================================== |
| 1170 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 6040aaa | 2000-10-09 21:27:22 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1171 | What is release candidate 1? |
| 1172 | |
| 1173 | We believe that release candidate 1 will fix all known bugs that we |
| 1174 | intend to fix for the 2.0 final release. This release should be a bit |
| 1175 | more stable than the previous betas. We would like to see even more |
| 1176 | widespread testing before the final release, so we are producing this |
| 1177 | release candidate. The final release will be exactly the same unless |
| 1178 | any show-stopping (or brown bag) bugs are found by testers of the |
| 1179 | release candidate. |
| 1180 | |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1181 | 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] | 1182 | to support building Python for specific platforms. |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1183 | |
| 1184 | Core language, builtins, and interpreter |
| 1185 | |
| 1186 | - A bug that caused crashes when __coerce__ was used with augmented |
| 1187 | assignment, e.g. +=, was fixed. |
| 1188 | |
| 1189 | - Raise ZeroDivisionError when raising zero to a negative number, |
| 1190 | e.g. 0.0 ** -2.0. Note that math.pow is unrelated to the builtin |
| 1191 | power operator and the result of math.pow(0.0, -2.0) will vary by |
| 1192 | platform. On Linux, it raises a ValueError. |
| 1193 | |
| 1194 | - A bug in Unicode string interpolation was fixed that occasionally |
| 1195 | caused errors with formats including "%%". For example, the |
| 1196 | following expression "%% %s" % u"abc" no longer raises a TypeError. |
| 1197 | |
| 1198 | - Compilation of deeply nested expressions raises MemoryError instead |
| 1199 | of SyntaxError, e.g. eval("[" * 50 + "]" * 50). |
| 1200 | |
| 1201 | - In 2.0b2 on Windows, the interpreter wrote .pyc files in text mode, |
| 1202 | rendering them useless. They are now written in binary mode again. |
| 1203 | |
| 1204 | Standard library |
| 1205 | |
| 1206 | - Keyword arguments are now accepted for most pattern and match object |
| 1207 | methods in SRE, the standard regular expression engine. |
| 1208 | |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1209 | - In SRE, fixed error with negative lookahead and lookbehind that |
Jeremy Hylton | 32e20ff | 2000-10-09 19:48:11 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1210 | manifested itself as a runtime error in patterns like "(?<!abc)(def)". |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1211 | |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1212 | - Several bugs in the Unicode handling and error handling in _tkinter |
| 1213 | were fixed. |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1214 | |
| 1215 | - Fix memory management errors in Merge() and Tkapp_Call() routines. |
| 1216 | |
| 1217 | - Several changes were made to cStringIO to make it compatible with |
| 1218 | the file-like object interface and with StringIO. If operations are |
| 1219 | performed on a closed object, an exception is raised. The truncate |
| 1220 | method now accepts a position argument and readline accepts a size |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1221 | argument. |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1222 | |
| 1223 | - There were many changes made to the linuxaudiodev module and its |
| 1224 | test suite; as a result, a short, unexpected audio sample should now |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1225 | play when the regression test is run. |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1226 | |
| 1227 | Note that this module is named poorly, because it should work |
| 1228 | correctly on any platform that supports the Open Sound System |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1229 | (OSS). |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1230 | |
| 1231 | The module now raises exceptions when errors occur instead of |
| 1232 | crashing. It also defines the AFMT_A_LAW format (logarithmic A-law |
| 1233 | audio) and defines a getptr() method that calls the |
| 1234 | SNDCTL_DSP_GETxPTR ioctl defined in the OSS Programmer's Guide. |
| 1235 | |
| 1236 | - The library_version attribute, introduced in an earlier beta, was |
| 1237 | removed because it can not be supported with early versions of the C |
| 1238 | readline library, which provides no way to determine the version at |
| 1239 | compile-time. |
| 1240 | |
| 1241 | - The binascii module is now enabled on Win64. |
| 1242 | |
Tim Peters | 46446d6 | 2000-10-09 21:19:31 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1243 | - tokenize.py no longer suffers "recursion depth" errors when parsing |
| 1244 | programs with very long string literals. |
| 1245 | |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1246 | Internals |
| 1247 | |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1248 | - Fixed several buffer overflow vulnerabilities in calculate_path(), |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1249 | which is called when the interpreter starts up to determine where |
| 1250 | the standard library is installed. These vulnerabilities affect all |
| 1251 | previous versions of Python and can be exploited by setting very |
| 1252 | long values for PYTHONHOME or argv[0]. The risk is greatest for a |
| 1253 | setuid Python script, although use of the wrapper in |
| 1254 | Misc/setuid-prog.c will eliminate the vulnerability. |
| 1255 | |
| 1256 | - Fixed garbage collection bugs in instance creation that were |
| 1257 | triggered when errors occurred during initialization. The solution, |
| 1258 | applied in cPickle and in PyInstance_New(), is to call |
| 1259 | PyObject_GC_Init() after the initialization of the object's |
| 1260 | container attributes is complete. |
| 1261 | |
| 1262 | - pyexpat adds definitions of PyModule_AddStringConstant and |
| 1263 | PyModule_AddObject if the Python version is less than 2.0, which |
| 1264 | provides compatibility with PyXML on Python 1.5.2. |
| 1265 | |
| 1266 | - If the platform has a bogus definition for LONG_BIT (the number of |
| 1267 | bits in a long), an error will be reported at compile time. |
| 1268 | |
| 1269 | - Fix bugs in _PyTuple_Resize() which caused hard-to-interpret garbage |
| 1270 | collection crashes and possibly other, unreported crashes. |
| 1271 | |
| 1272 | - Fixed a memory leak in _PyUnicode_Fini(). |
| 1273 | |
| 1274 | Build issues |
| 1275 | |
| 1276 | - configure now accepts a --with-suffix option that specifies the |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1277 | executable suffix. This is useful for builds on Cygwin and Mac OS |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1278 | X, for example. |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1279 | |
| 1280 | - The mmap.PAGESIZE constant is now initialized using sysconf when |
| 1281 | possible, which eliminates a dependency on -lucb for Reliant UNIX. |
| 1282 | |
| 1283 | - The md5 file should now compile on all platforms. |
| 1284 | |
| 1285 | - The select module now compiles on platforms that do not define |
| 1286 | POLLRDNORM and related constants. |
| 1287 | |
| 1288 | - Darwin (Mac OS X): Initial support for static builds on this |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1289 | platform. |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1290 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 1092120 | 2000-10-09 18:34:12 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1291 | - BeOS: A number of changes were made to the build and installation |
| 1292 | process. ar-fake now operates on a directory of object files. |
| 1293 | dl_export.h is gone, and its macros now appear on the mwcc command |
| 1294 | line during build on PPC BeOS. |
| 1295 | |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1296 | - Platform directory in lib/python2.0 is "plat-beos5" (or |
Jeremy Hylton | 1092120 | 2000-10-09 18:34:12 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1297 | "plat-beos4", if building on BeOS 4.5), rather than "plat-beos". |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1298 | |
| 1299 | - Cygwin: Support for shared libraries, Tkinter, and sockets. |
| 1300 | |
| 1301 | - SunOS 4.1.4_JL: Fix test for directory existence in configure. |
| 1302 | |
| 1303 | Tools and other miscellany |
| 1304 | |
| 1305 | - Removed debugging prints from main used with freeze. |
| 1306 | |
Tim Peters | 46446d6 | 2000-10-09 21:19:31 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1307 | - IDLE auto-indent no longer crashes when it encounters Unicode |
| 1308 | characters. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1309 | |
| 1310 | What's new in 2.0 beta 2 (since beta 1)? |
| 1311 | ======================================== |
| 1312 | |
| 1313 | Core language, builtins, and interpreter |
| 1314 | |
Tim Peters | 482c021 | 2000-09-26 06:33:09 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1315 | - 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] | 1316 | "%d" % 2L**64 == "18446744073709551616". |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1317 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1318 | - Add -h and -V command line options to print the usage message and |
| 1319 | Python version number and exit immediately. |
| 1320 | |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1321 | - eval() and exec accept Unicode objects as code parameters. |
| 1322 | |
| 1323 | - getattr() and setattr() now also accept Unicode objects for the |
| 1324 | attribute name, which are converted to strings using the default |
| 1325 | encoding before lookup. |
| 1326 | |
| 1327 | - Multiplication on string and Unicode now does proper bounds |
| 1328 | checking; e.g. 'a' * 65536 * 65536 will raise ValueError, "repeated |
| 1329 | string is too long." |
| 1330 | |
| 1331 | - Better error message when continue is found in try statement in a |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1332 | loop. |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1333 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1334 | |
| 1335 | Standard library and extensions |
| 1336 | |
Guido van Rossum | 5b08f13 | 2001-04-16 02:05:23 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1337 | - socket module: the OpenSSL code now adds support for RAND_status() |
| 1338 | and EGD (Entropy Gathering Device). |
| 1339 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1340 | - array: reverse() method of array now works. buffer_info() now does |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1341 | argument checking; it still takes no arguments. |
| 1342 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1343 | - asyncore/asynchat: Included most recent version from Sam Rushing. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1344 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1345 | - cgi: Accept '&' or ';' as separator characters when parsing form data. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1346 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1347 | - CGIHTTPServer: Now works on Windows (and perhaps even Mac). |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1348 | |
| 1349 | - ConfigParser: When reading the file, options spelled in upper case |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1350 | letters are now correctly converted to lowercase. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1351 | |
| 1352 | - copy: Copy Unicode objects atomically. |
| 1353 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1354 | - cPickle: Fail gracefully when copy_reg can't be imported. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1355 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1356 | - cStringIO: Implemented readlines() method. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1357 | |
Fred Drake | 67233bc | 2000-09-26 16:40:27 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1358 | - dbm: Add get() and setdefault() methods to dbm object. Add constant |
| 1359 | `library' to module that names the library used. Added doc strings |
| 1360 | and method names to error messages. Uses configure to determine |
| 1361 | which ndbm.h file to include; Berkeley DB's nbdm and GDBM's ndbm is |
| 1362 | now available options. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1363 | |
| 1364 | - distutils: Update to version 0.9.3. |
| 1365 | |
| 1366 | - dl: Add several dl.RTLD_ constants. |
| 1367 | |
| 1368 | - fpectl: Now supported on FreeBSD. |
| 1369 | |
| 1370 | - gc: Add DEBUG_SAVEALL option. When enabled all garbage objects |
| 1371 | found by the collector will be saved in gc.garbage. This is useful |
| 1372 | for debugging a program that creates reference cycles. |
| 1373 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1374 | - httplib: Three changes: Restore support for set_debuglevel feature |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1375 | of HTTP class. Do not close socket on zero-length response. Do not |
| 1376 | crash when server sends invalid content-length header. |
| 1377 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1378 | - mailbox: Mailbox class conforms better to qmail specifications. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1379 | |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1380 | - marshal: When reading a short, sign-extend on platforms where shorts |
| 1381 | are bigger than 16 bits. When reading a long, repair the unportable |
| 1382 | sign extension that was being done for 64-bit machines. (It assumed |
| 1383 | that signed right shift sign-extends.) |
| 1384 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1385 | - operator: Add contains(), invert(), __invert__() as aliases for |
| 1386 | __contains__(), inv(), and __inv__() respectively. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1387 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1388 | - os: Add support for popen2() and popen3() on all platforms where |
| 1389 | fork() exists. (popen4() is still in the works.) |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1390 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1391 | - os: (Windows only:) Add startfile() function that acts like double- |
Tim Peters | 482c021 | 2000-09-26 06:33:09 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1392 | clicking on a file in Explorer (or passing the file name to the |
| 1393 | DOS "start" command). |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1394 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1395 | - os.path: (Windows, DOS:) Treat trailing colon correctly in |
Tim Peters | 482c021 | 2000-09-26 06:33:09 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1396 | os.path.join. os.path.join("a:", "b") yields "a:b". |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1397 | |
| 1398 | - pickle: Now raises ValueError when an invalid pickle that contains |
| 1399 | a non-string repr where a string repr was expected. This behavior |
| 1400 | matches cPickle. |
| 1401 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1402 | - posixfile: Remove broken __del__() method. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1403 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1404 | - py_compile: support CR+LF line terminators in source file. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1405 | |
| 1406 | - readline: Does not immediately exit when ^C is hit when readline and |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1407 | threads are configured. Adds definition of rl_library_version. (The |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1408 | latter addition requires GNU readline 2.2 or later.) |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1409 | |
| 1410 | - rfc822: Domain literals returned by AddrlistClass method |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1411 | getdomainliteral() are now properly wrapped in brackets. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1412 | |
| 1413 | - site: sys.setdefaultencoding() should only be called in case the |
Tim Peters | 482c021 | 2000-09-26 06:33:09 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1414 | standard default encoding ("ascii") is changed. This saves quite a |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1415 | few cycles during startup since the first call to |
| 1416 | setdefaultencoding() will initialize the codec registry and the |
| 1417 | encodings package. |
| 1418 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1419 | - socket: Support for size hint in readlines() method of object returned |
| 1420 | by makefile(). |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1421 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1422 | - sre: Added experimental expand() method to match objects. Does not |
Jeremy Hylton | 625915e | 2000-10-02 13:43:33 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1423 | use buffer interface on Unicode strings. Does not hang if group id |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1424 | is followed by whitespace. |
| 1425 | |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1426 | - StringIO: Size hint in readlines() is now supported as documented. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1427 | |
| 1428 | - struct: Check ranges for bytes and shorts. |
| 1429 | |
| 1430 | - urllib: Improved handling of win32 proxy settings. Fixed quote and |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1431 | quote_plus functions so that the always encode a comma. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1432 | |
| 1433 | - Tkinter: Image objects are now guaranteed to have unique ids. Set |
| 1434 | event.delta to zero if Tk version doesn't support mousewheel. |
| 1435 | Removed some debugging prints. |
| 1436 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1437 | - UserList: now implements __contains__(). |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1438 | |
Fred Drake | 67233bc | 2000-09-26 16:40:27 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1439 | - webbrowser: On Windows, use os.startfile() instead of os.popen(), |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1440 | which works around a bug in Norton AntiVirus 2000 that leads directly |
| 1441 | to a Blue Screen freeze. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1442 | |
| 1443 | - xml: New version detection code allows PyXML to override standard |
| 1444 | XML package if PyXML version is greater than 0.6.1. |
| 1445 | |
Fred Drake | 64bb380 | 2000-09-26 16:21:35 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1446 | - xml.dom: DOM level 1 support for basic XML. Includes xml.dom.minidom |
| 1447 | (conventional DOM), and xml.dom.pulldom, which allows building the DOM |
| 1448 | tree only for nodes which are sufficiently interesting to a specific |
| 1449 | application. Does not provide the HTML-specific extensions. Still |
| 1450 | undocumented. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1451 | |
Fred Drake | 64bb380 | 2000-09-26 16:21:35 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1452 | - xml.sax: SAX 2 support for Python, including all the handler |
| 1453 | interfaces needed to process XML 1.0 compliant XML. Some |
| 1454 | documentation is already available. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1455 | |
Fred Drake | 64bb380 | 2000-09-26 16:21:35 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1456 | - pyexpat: Renamed to xml.parsers.expat since this is part of the new, |
| 1457 | packagized XML support. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1458 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1459 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1460 | C API |
| 1461 | |
| 1462 | - Add three new convenience functions for module initialization -- |
| 1463 | PyModule_AddObject(), PyModule_AddIntConstant(), and |
| 1464 | PyModule_AddStringConstant(). |
| 1465 | |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1466 | - Cleaned up definition of NULL in C source code; all definitions were |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1467 | removed and add #error to Python.h if NULL isn't defined after |
| 1468 | #include of stdio.h. |
| 1469 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1470 | - 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] | 1471 | backwards compatibility (at the source level) with old extensions. |
| 1472 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1473 | - A wrapper API was added for signal() and sigaction(). Instead of |
| 1474 | either function, always use PyOS_getsig() to get a signal handler |
| 1475 | and PyOS_setsig() to set one. A new convenience typedef |
| 1476 | PyOS_sighandler_t is defined for the type of signal handlers. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1477 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1478 | - Add PyString_AsStringAndSize() function that provides access to the |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1479 | internal data buffer and size of a string object -- or the default |
| 1480 | encoded version of a Unicode object. |
| 1481 | |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1482 | - PyString_Size() and PyString_AsString() accept Unicode objects. |
| 1483 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1484 | - 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] | 1485 | exists). INT_MAX and LONG_MAX will always be defined, even if |
| 1486 | <limits.h> is not available. |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1487 | |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1488 | - PyFloat_FromString takes a second argument, pend, that was |
| 1489 | effectively useless. It is now officially useless but preserved for |
| 1490 | backwards compatibility. If the pend argument is not NULL, *pend is |
| 1491 | set to NULL. |
| 1492 | |
| 1493 | - PyObject_GetAttr() and PyObject_SetAttr() now accept Unicode objects |
| 1494 | for the attribute name. See note on getattr() above. |
| 1495 | |
| 1496 | - A few bug fixes to argument processing for Unicode. |
| 1497 | PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() now accepts "es#" and "es". |
| 1498 | PyArg_Parse() special cases "s#" for Unicode objects; it returns a |
| 1499 | pointer to the default encoded string data instead of to the raw |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1500 | UTF-16. |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1501 | |
| 1502 | - Py_BuildValue accepts B format (for bgen-generated code). |
| 1503 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1504 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1505 | Internals |
| 1506 | |
| 1507 | - On Unix, fix code for finding Python installation directory so that |
| 1508 | it works when argv[0] is a relative path. |
| 1509 | |
Andrew M. Kuchling | a1099be | 2000-12-15 01:16:43 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1510 | - Added a true unicode_internal_encode() function and fixed the |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1511 | unicode_internal_decode function() to support Unicode objects directly |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1512 | rather than by generating a copy of the object. |
| 1513 | |
Tim Peters | 482c021 | 2000-09-26 06:33:09 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1514 | - Several of the internal Unicode tables are much smaller now, and |
| 1515 | the source code should be much friendlier to weaker compilers. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1516 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 97693b0 | 2000-09-26 17:42:51 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1517 | - In the garbage collector: Fixed bug in collection of tuples. Fixed |
| 1518 | bug that caused some instances to be removed from the container set |
| 1519 | while they were still live. Fixed parsing in gc.set_debug() for |
| 1520 | platforms where sizeof(long) > sizeof(int). |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1521 | |
| 1522 | - Fixed refcount problem in instance deallocation that only occurred |
| 1523 | when Py_REF_DEBUG was defined and Py_TRACE_REFS was not. |
| 1524 | |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1525 | - On Windows, getpythonregpath is now protected against null data in |
| 1526 | registry key. |
| 1527 | |
| 1528 | - 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] | 1529 | condition. |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1530 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1531 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1532 | Build and platform-specific issues |
| 1533 | |
| 1534 | - Better support of GNU Pth via --with-pth configure option. |
| 1535 | |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1536 | - Python/C API now properly exposed to dynamically-loaded extension |
| 1537 | modules on Reliant UNIX. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1538 | |
| 1539 | - Changes for the benefit of SunOS 4.1.4 (really!). mmapmodule.c: |
| 1540 | Don't define MS_SYNC to be zero when it is undefined. Added missing |
| 1541 | prototypes in posixmodule.c. |
| 1542 | |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1543 | - Improved support for HP-UX build. Threads should now be correctly |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1544 | configured (on HP-UX 10.20 and 11.00). |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1545 | |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1546 | - Fix largefile support on older NetBSD systems and OpenBSD by adding |
| 1547 | define for TELL64. |
| 1548 | |
| 1549 | |
| 1550 | Tools and other miscellany |
| 1551 | |
| 1552 | - ftpmirror: Call to main() is wrapped in if __name__ == "__main__". |
| 1553 | |
| 1554 | - freeze: The modulefinder now works with 2.0 opcodes. |
| 1555 | |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1556 | - IDLE: |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1557 | Move hackery of sys.argv until after the Tk instance has been |
| 1558 | created, which allows the application-specific Tkinter |
| 1559 | initialization to be executed if present; also pass an explicit |
| 1560 | className parameter to the Tk() constructor. |
Fred Drake | 64bb380 | 2000-09-26 16:21:35 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1561 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1562 | |
| 1563 | What's new in 2.0 beta 1? |
| 1564 | ========================= |
| 1565 | |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1566 | Source Incompatibilities |
| 1567 | ------------------------ |
| 1568 | |
| 1569 | None. Note that 1.6 introduced several incompatibilities with 1.5.2, |
| 1570 | such as single-argument append(), connect() and bind(), and changes to |
| 1571 | str(long) and repr(float). |
| 1572 | |
| 1573 | |
| 1574 | Binary Incompatibilities |
| 1575 | ------------------------ |
| 1576 | |
| 1577 | - Third party extensions built for Python 1.5.x or 1.6 cannot be used |
| 1578 | with Python 2.0; these extensions will have to be rebuilt for Python |
| 1579 | 2.0. |
| 1580 | |
| 1581 | - On Windows, attempting to import a third party extension built for |
| 1582 | Python 1.5.x or 1.6 results in an immediate crash; there's not much we |
| 1583 | can do about this. Check your PYTHONPATH environment variable! |
| 1584 | |
| 1585 | - Python bytecode files (*.pyc and *.pyo) are not compatible between |
| 1586 | releases. |
| 1587 | |
| 1588 | |
| 1589 | Overview of Changes Since 1.6 |
| 1590 | ----------------------------- |
| 1591 | |
| 1592 | There are many new modules (including brand new XML support through |
| 1593 | the xml package, and i18n support through the gettext module); a list |
| 1594 | of all new modules is included below. Lots of bugs have been fixed. |
| 1595 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1596 | The process for making major new changes to the language has changed |
| 1597 | since Python 1.6. Enhancements must now be documented by a Python |
| 1598 | Enhancement Proposal (PEP) before they can be accepted. |
| 1599 | |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1600 | There are several important syntax enhancements, described in more |
| 1601 | detail below: |
| 1602 | |
| 1603 | - Augmented assignment, e.g. x += 1 |
| 1604 | |
| 1605 | - List comprehensions, e.g. [x**2 for x in range(10)] |
| 1606 | |
| 1607 | - Extended import statement, e.g. import Module as Name |
| 1608 | |
| 1609 | - Extended print statement, e.g. print >> file, "Hello" |
| 1610 | |
| 1611 | Other important changes: |
| 1612 | |
| 1613 | - Optional collection of cyclical garbage |
| 1614 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1615 | Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) |
| 1616 | --------------------------------- |
| 1617 | |
| 1618 | PEP stands for Python Enhancement Proposal. A PEP is a design |
| 1619 | document providing information to the Python community, or describing |
| 1620 | a new feature for Python. The PEP should provide a concise technical |
| 1621 | specification of the feature and a rationale for the feature. |
| 1622 | |
| 1623 | We intend PEPs to be the primary mechanisms for proposing new |
| 1624 | features, for collecting community input on an issue, and for |
| 1625 | documenting the design decisions that have gone into Python. The PEP |
| 1626 | author is responsible for building consensus within the community and |
| 1627 | documenting dissenting opinions. |
| 1628 | |
| 1629 | The PEPs are available at http://python.sourceforge.net/peps/. |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1630 | |
| 1631 | Augmented Assignment |
| 1632 | -------------------- |
| 1633 | |
| 1634 | This must have been the most-requested feature of the past years! |
| 1635 | Eleven new assignment operators were added: |
| 1636 | |
Guido van Rossum | e905e95 | 2000-09-05 12:42:46 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1637 | += -= *= /= %= **= <<= >>= &= ^= |= |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1638 | |
| 1639 | For example, |
| 1640 | |
| 1641 | A += B |
| 1642 | |
| 1643 | is similar to |
| 1644 | |
| 1645 | A = A + B |
| 1646 | |
| 1647 | except that A is evaluated only once (relevant when A is something |
| 1648 | like dict[index].attr). |
| 1649 | |
| 1650 | However, if A is a mutable object, A may be modified in place. Thus, |
| 1651 | if A is a number or a string, A += B has the same effect as A = A+B |
| 1652 | (except A is only evaluated once); but if a is a list, A += B has the |
| 1653 | same effect as A.extend(B)! |
| 1654 | |
| 1655 | Classes and built-in object types can override the new operators in |
| 1656 | order to implement the in-place behavior; the not-in-place behavior is |
| 1657 | used automatically as a fallback when an object doesn't implement the |
| 1658 | in-place behavior. For classes, the method name is derived from the |
| 1659 | method name for the corresponding not-in-place operator by inserting |
| 1660 | an 'i' in front of the name, e.g. __iadd__ implements in-place |
| 1661 | __add__. |
| 1662 | |
| 1663 | Augmented assignment was implemented by Thomas Wouters. |
| 1664 | |
| 1665 | |
| 1666 | List Comprehensions |
| 1667 | ------------------- |
| 1668 | |
| 1669 | This is a flexible new notation for lists whose elements are computed |
| 1670 | from another list (or lists). The simplest form is: |
| 1671 | |
| 1672 | [<expression> for <variable> in <sequence>] |
| 1673 | |
Guido van Rossum | 56db095 | 2000-09-06 23:34:25 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1674 | 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] | 1675 | 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] | 1676 | |
| 1677 | You can also add a condition: |
| 1678 | |
| 1679 | [<expression> for <variable> in <sequence> if <condition>] |
| 1680 | |
| 1681 | For example, [w for w in words if w == w.lower()] would yield the list |
| 1682 | of words that contain no uppercase characters. This is more efficient |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1683 | 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] | 1684 | |
| 1685 | You can also have nested for loops and more than one 'if' clause. For |
| 1686 | example, here's a function that flattens a sequence of sequences:: |
| 1687 | |
| 1688 | def flatten(seq): |
| 1689 | return [x for subseq in seq for x in subseq] |
| 1690 | |
| 1691 | flatten([[0], [1,2,3], [4,5], [6,7,8,9], []]) |
| 1692 | |
| 1693 | This prints |
| 1694 | |
| 1695 | [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9] |
| 1696 | |
| 1697 | List comprehensions originated as a patch set from Greg Ewing; Skip |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1698 | Montanaro and Thomas Wouters also contributed. Described by PEP 202. |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1699 | |
| 1700 | |
| 1701 | Extended Import Statement |
| 1702 | ------------------------- |
| 1703 | |
| 1704 | Many people have asked for a way to import a module under a different |
| 1705 | name. This can be accomplished like this: |
| 1706 | |
| 1707 | import foo |
| 1708 | bar = foo |
| 1709 | del foo |
| 1710 | |
| 1711 | but this common idiom gets old quickly. A simple extension of the |
| 1712 | import statement now allows this to be written as follows: |
| 1713 | |
| 1714 | import foo as bar |
| 1715 | |
| 1716 | There's also a variant for 'from ... import': |
| 1717 | |
| 1718 | from foo import bar as spam |
| 1719 | |
| 1720 | This also works with packages; e.g. you can write this: |
| 1721 | |
| 1722 | import test.regrtest as regrtest |
| 1723 | |
| 1724 | Note that 'as' is not a new keyword -- it is recognized only in this |
| 1725 | context (this is only possible because the syntax for the import |
| 1726 | statement doesn't involve expressions). |
| 1727 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1728 | Implemented by Thomas Wouters. Described by PEP 221. |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1729 | |
| 1730 | |
| 1731 | Extended Print Statement |
| 1732 | ------------------------ |
| 1733 | |
| 1734 | Easily the most controversial new feature, this extension to the print |
| 1735 | statement adds an option to make the output go to a different file |
| 1736 | than the default sys.stdout. |
| 1737 | |
| 1738 | For example, to write an error message to sys.stderr, you can now |
| 1739 | write: |
| 1740 | |
| 1741 | print >> sys.stderr, "Error: bad dog!" |
| 1742 | |
| 1743 | As a special feature, if the expression used to indicate the file |
Fred Drake | 45888ff | 2000-09-29 17:09:11 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1744 | 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] | 1745 | |
| 1746 | print >> None, "Hello world" |
| 1747 | |
| 1748 | is equivalent to |
| 1749 | |
| 1750 | print "Hello world" |
| 1751 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1752 | Design and implementation by Barry Warsaw. Described by PEP 214. |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1753 | |
| 1754 | |
| 1755 | Optional Collection of Cyclical Garbage |
| 1756 | --------------------------------------- |
| 1757 | |
| 1758 | Python is now equipped with a garbage collector that can hunt down |
| 1759 | cyclical references between Python objects. It's no replacement for |
| 1760 | reference counting; in fact, it depends on the reference counts being |
| 1761 | correct, and decides that a set of objects belong to a cycle if all |
| 1762 | their reference counts can be accounted for from their references to |
| 1763 | each other. This devious scheme was first proposed by Eric Tiedemann, |
| 1764 | and brought to implementation by Neil Schemenauer. |
| 1765 | |
| 1766 | There's a module "gc" that lets you control some parameters of the |
| 1767 | garbage collection. There's also an option to the configure script |
| 1768 | that lets you enable or disable the garbage collection. In 2.0b1, |
| 1769 | it's on by default, so that we (hopefully) can collect decent user |
| 1770 | experience with this new feature. There are some questions about its |
Fred Drake | 9f11cf8 | 2000-09-29 17:54:40 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1771 | 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] | 1772 | off by default in the final 2.0 release. |
| 1773 | |
| 1774 | |
| 1775 | Smaller Changes |
| 1776 | --------------- |
| 1777 | |
| 1778 | A new function zip() was added. zip(seq1, seq2, ...) is equivalent to |
| 1779 | map(None, seq1, seq2, ...) when the sequences have the same length; |
| 1780 | i.e. zip([1,2,3], [10,20,30]) returns [(1,10), (2,20), (3,30)]. When |
| 1781 | the lists are not all the same length, the shortest list wins: |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1782 | 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] | 1783 | |
| 1784 | sys.version_info is a tuple (major, minor, micro, level, serial). |
| 1785 | |
| 1786 | Dictionaries have an odd new method, setdefault(key, default). |
| 1787 | dict.setdefault(key, default) returns dict[key] if it exists; if not, |
| 1788 | it sets dict[key] to default and returns that value. Thus: |
| 1789 | |
| 1790 | dict.setdefault(key, []).append(item) |
| 1791 | |
| 1792 | does the same work as this common idiom: |
| 1793 | |
| 1794 | if not dict.has_key(key): |
| 1795 | dict[key] = [] |
| 1796 | dict[key].append(item) |
| 1797 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1798 | There are two new variants of SyntaxError that are raised for |
| 1799 | indentation-related errors: IndentationError and TabError. |
| 1800 | |
| 1801 | Changed \x to consume exactly two hex digits; see PEP 223. Added \U |
| 1802 | escape that consumes exactly eight hex digits. |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1803 | |
| 1804 | The limits on the size of expressions and file in Python source code |
| 1805 | have been raised from 2**16 to 2**32. Previous versions of Python |
| 1806 | were limited because the maximum argument size the Python VM accepted |
| 1807 | was 2**16. This limited the size of object constructor expressions, |
| 1808 | e.g. [1,2,3] or {'a':1, 'b':2}, and the size of source files. This |
| 1809 | limit was raised thanks to a patch by Charles Waldman that effectively |
| 1810 | fixes the problem. It is now much more likely that you will be |
| 1811 | limited by available memory than by an arbitrary limit in Python. |
| 1812 | |
| 1813 | The interpreter's maximum recursion depth can be modified by Python |
| 1814 | programs using sys.getrecursionlimit and sys.setrecursionlimit. This |
| 1815 | limit is the maximum number of recursive calls that can be made by |
| 1816 | Python code. The limit exists to prevent infinite recursion from |
| 1817 | overflowing the C stack and causing a core dump. The default value is |
| 1818 | 1000. The maximum safe value for a particular platform can be found |
| 1819 | by running Misc/find_recursionlimit.py. |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1820 | |
| 1821 | New Modules and Packages |
| 1822 | ------------------------ |
| 1823 | |
| 1824 | atexit - for registering functions to be called when Python exits. |
| 1825 | |
| 1826 | imputil - Greg Stein's alternative API for writing custom import |
| 1827 | hooks. |
| 1828 | |
| 1829 | pyexpat - an interface to the Expat XML parser, contributed by Paul |
| 1830 | Prescod. |
| 1831 | |
| 1832 | xml - a new package with XML support code organized (so far) in three |
| 1833 | subpackages: xml.dom, xml.sax, and xml.parsers. Describing these |
| 1834 | would fill a volume. There's a special feature whereby a |
| 1835 | user-installed package named _xmlplus overrides the standard |
| 1836 | xmlpackage; this is intended to give the XML SIG a hook to distribute |
| 1837 | backwards-compatible updates to the standard xml package. |
| 1838 | |
| 1839 | webbrowser - a platform-independent API to launch a web browser. |
| 1840 | |
| 1841 | |
Guido van Rossum | e905e95 | 2000-09-05 12:42:46 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1842 | Changed Modules |
| 1843 | --------------- |
| 1844 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1845 | array -- new methods for array objects: count, extend, index, pop, and |
| 1846 | remove |
| 1847 | |
| 1848 | binascii -- new functions b2a_hex and a2b_hex that convert between |
| 1849 | binary data and its hex representation |
| 1850 | |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1851 | calendar -- Many new functions that support features including control |
| 1852 | over which day of the week is the first day, returning strings instead |
| 1853 | of printing them. Also new symbolic constants for days of week, |
| 1854 | e.g. MONDAY, ..., SUNDAY. |
| 1855 | |
| 1856 | cgi -- FieldStorage objects have a getvalue method that works like a |
| 1857 | dictionary's get method and returns the value attribute of the object. |
| 1858 | |
| 1859 | ConfigParser -- The parser object has new methods has_option, |
| 1860 | remove_section, remove_option, set, and write. They allow the module |
| 1861 | to be used for writing config files as well as reading them. |
| 1862 | |
| 1863 | ftplib -- ntransfercmd(), transfercmd(), and retrbinary() all now |
Guido van Rossum | e905e95 | 2000-09-05 12:42:46 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1864 | optionally support the RFC 959 REST command. |
| 1865 | |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1866 | gzip -- readline and readlines now accept optional size arguments |
Guido van Rossum | e905e95 | 2000-09-05 12:42:46 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1867 | |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1868 | httplib -- New interfaces and support for HTTP/1.1 by Greg Stein. See |
| 1869 | the module doc strings for details. |
Guido van Rossum | 830ca2a | 2000-09-05 15:34:16 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1870 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1871 | locale -- implement getdefaultlocale for Win32 and Macintosh |
| 1872 | |
| 1873 | marshal -- no longer dumps core when marshaling deeply nested or |
| 1874 | recursive data structures |
| 1875 | |
| 1876 | os -- new functions isatty, seteuid, setegid, setreuid, setregid |
| 1877 | |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1878 | os/popen2 -- popen2/popen3/popen4 support under Windows. popen2/popen3 |
| 1879 | support under Unix. |
| 1880 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1881 | os/pty -- support for openpty and forkpty |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1882 | |
| 1883 | os.path -- fix semantics of os.path.commonprefix |
| 1884 | |
| 1885 | smtplib -- support for sending very long messages |
| 1886 | |
| 1887 | socket -- new function getfqdn() |
| 1888 | |
| 1889 | readline -- new functions to read, write and truncate history files. |
| 1890 | The readline section of the library reference manual contains an |
| 1891 | example. |
| 1892 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1893 | select -- add interface to poll system call |
| 1894 | |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1895 | shutil -- new copyfileobj function |
| 1896 | |
| 1897 | SimpleHTTPServer, CGIHTTPServer -- Fix problems with buffering in the |
| 1898 | HTTP server. |
| 1899 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1900 | Tkinter -- optimization of function flatten |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1901 | |
| 1902 | urllib -- scans environment variables for proxy configuration, |
Tim Peters | 8b09233 | 2000-09-05 20:15:25 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1903 | e.g. http_proxy. |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1904 | |
| 1905 | whichdb -- recognizes dumbdbm format |
Guido van Rossum | e905e95 | 2000-09-05 12:42:46 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1906 | |
| 1907 | |
| 1908 | Obsolete Modules |
| 1909 | ---------------- |
| 1910 | |
| 1911 | None. However note that 1.6 made a whole slew of modules obsolete: |
| 1912 | stdwin, soundex, cml, cmpcache, dircache, dump, find, grep, packmail, |
| 1913 | poly, zmod, strop, util, whatsound. |
| 1914 | |
| 1915 | |
| 1916 | Changed, New, Obsolete Tools |
| 1917 | ---------------------------- |
| 1918 | |
Tim Peters | 8b09233 | 2000-09-05 20:15:25 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1919 | None. |
Guido van Rossum | e905e95 | 2000-09-05 12:42:46 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1920 | |
| 1921 | |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1922 | C-level Changes |
| 1923 | --------------- |
| 1924 | |
| 1925 | Several cleanup jobs were carried out throughout the source code. |
| 1926 | |
| 1927 | All C code was converted to ANSI C; we got rid of all uses of the |
| 1928 | Py_PROTO() macro, which makes the header files a lot more readable. |
| 1929 | |
| 1930 | Most of the portability hacks were moved to a new header file, |
| 1931 | pyport.h; several other new header files were added and some old |
| 1932 | header files were removed, in an attempt to create a more rational set |
| 1933 | of header files. (Few of these ever need to be included explicitly; |
| 1934 | they are all included by Python.h.) |
| 1935 | |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1936 | Trent Mick ensured portability to 64-bit platforms, under both Linux |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1937 | and Win64, especially for the new Intel Itanium processor. Mick also |
| 1938 | added large file support for Linux64 and Win64. |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1939 | |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1940 | The C APIs to return an object's size have been update to consistently |
| 1941 | use the form PyXXX_Size, e.g. PySequence_Size and PyDict_Size. In |
| 1942 | previous versions, the abstract interfaces used PyXXX_Length and the |
| 1943 | concrete interfaces used PyXXX_Size. The old names, |
| 1944 | e.g. PyObject_Length, are still available for backwards compatibility |
| 1945 | at the API level, but are deprecated. |
| 1946 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1947 | The PyOS_CheckStack function has been implemented on Windows by |
| 1948 | Fredrik Lundh. It prevents Python from failing with a stack overflow |
| 1949 | on Windows. |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1950 | |
| 1951 | The GC changes resulted in creation of two new slots on object, |
| 1952 | tp_traverse and tp_clear. The augmented assignment changes result in |
Guido van Rossum | 4338a28 | 2000-09-06 13:02:08 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1953 | the creation of a new slot for each in-place operator. |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1954 | |
| 1955 | The GC API creates new requirements for container types implemented in |
Guido van Rossum | 4338a28 | 2000-09-06 13:02:08 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1956 | C extension modules. See Include/objimpl.h for details. |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1957 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1958 | PyErr_Format has been updated to automatically calculate the size of |
| 1959 | the buffer needed to hold the formatted result string. This change |
| 1960 | prevents crashes caused by programmer error. |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1961 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1962 | New C API calls: PyObject_AsFileDescriptor, PyErr_WriteUnraisable. |
Guido van Rossum | e905e95 | 2000-09-05 12:42:46 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1963 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1964 | PyRun_AnyFileEx, PyRun_SimpleFileEx, PyRun_FileEx -- New functions |
| 1965 | that are the same as their non-Ex counterparts except they take an |
| 1966 | extra flag argument that tells them to close the file when done. |
| 1967 | |
| 1968 | 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] | 1969 | |
Tim Peters | 8b09233 | 2000-09-05 20:15:25 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1970 | |
| 1971 | Windows Changes |
| 1972 | --------------- |
| 1973 | |
| 1974 | New popen2/popen3/peopen4 in os module (see Changed Modules above). |
| 1975 | |
| 1976 | os.popen is much more usable on Windows 95 and 98. See Microsoft |
| 1977 | Knowledge Base article Q150956. The Win9x workaround described there |
| 1978 | is implemented by the new w9xpopen.exe helper in the root of your |
| 1979 | Python installation. Note that Python uses this internally; it is not |
| 1980 | a standalone program. |
| 1981 | |
| 1982 | Administrator privileges are no longer required to install Python |
| 1983 | on Windows NT or Windows 2000. If you have administrator privileges, |
| 1984 | Python's registry info will be written under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. |
| 1985 | Otherwise the installer backs off to writing Python's registry info |
Guido van Rossum | 4338a28 | 2000-09-06 13:02:08 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1986 | under HKEY_CURRENT_USER. The latter is sufficient for all "normal" |
Tim Peters | 8b09233 | 2000-09-05 20:15:25 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1987 | uses of Python, but will prevent some advanced uses from working |
| 1988 | (for example, running a Python script as an NT service, or possibly |
| 1989 | from CGI). |
| 1990 | |
| 1991 | [This was new in 1.6] The installer no longer runs a separate Tcl/Tk |
| 1992 | installer; instead, it installs the needed Tcl/Tk files directly in the |
| 1993 | Python directory. If you already have a Tcl/Tk installation, this |
| 1994 | wastes some disk space (about 4 Megs) but avoids problems with |
| 1995 | conflicting Tcl/Tk installations, and makes it much easier for Python |
| 1996 | to ensure that Tcl/Tk can find all its files. |
| 1997 | |
| 1998 | [This was new in 1.6] The Windows installer now installs by default in |
| 1999 | \Python20\ on the default volume, instead of \Program Files\Python-2.0\. |
| 2000 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 2001 | |
| 2002 | Updates to the changes between 1.5.2 and 1.6 |
| 2003 | -------------------------------------------- |
| 2004 | |
| 2005 | The 1.6 NEWS file can't be changed after the release is done, so here |
| 2006 | is some late-breaking news: |
| 2007 | |
| 2008 | New APIs in locale.py: normalize(), getdefaultlocale(), resetlocale(), |
| 2009 | and changes to getlocale() and setlocale(). |
| 2010 | |
| 2011 | The new module is now enabled per default. |
| 2012 | |
| 2013 | It is not true that the encodings codecs cannot be used for normal |
| 2014 | strings: the string.encode() (which is also present on 8-bit strings |
| 2015 | !) allows using them for 8-bit strings too, e.g. to convert files from |
| 2016 | cp1252 (Windows) to latin-1 or vice-versa. |
| 2017 | |
| 2018 | Japanese codecs are available from Tamito KAJIYAMA: |
| 2019 | http://pseudo.grad.sccs.chukyo-u.ac.jp/~kajiyama/python/ |
| 2020 | |
| 2021 | |
Guido van Rossum | ab9d6f0 | 1998-08-10 22:01:13 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 2022 | ====================================================================== |