Tim Peters | f553f89 | 2001-05-01 20:45:31 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1 | What's New in Python 2.2a0? |
| 2 | =========================== |
| 3 | |
| 4 | Core |
| 5 | |
Tim Peters | 61dff2b | 2001-05-08 15:43:37 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 6 | - Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full |
| 7 | precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a |
| 8 | .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the |
| 9 | 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754 |
| 10 | floating arithmetic, |
| 11 | |
| 12 | x = 9007199254740992.0 |
| 13 | print long(x) |
| 14 | |
| 15 | printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000 |
| 16 | if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using |
| 17 | str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal |
| 18 | now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full |
| 19 | machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion |
| 20 | functions are of good quality). |
| 21 | |
| 22 | This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and |
| 23 | usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable |
| 24 | algorithms to break. |
| 25 | |
Guido van Rossum | 1031582 | 2001-05-01 20:54:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 26 | - Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means |
| 27 | the same as dict.has_key(x). |
| 28 | |
| 29 | - Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values |
| 30 | to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter() |
| 31 | to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value |
| 32 | from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the |
| 33 | tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators |
| 34 | using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C). |
| 35 | Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys. |
| 36 | Iterating over a file generates its lines. |
| 37 | |
Tim Peters | f553f89 | 2001-05-01 20:45:31 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 38 | - The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator |
| 39 | arguments: |
Tim Peters | e63415e | 2001-05-08 04:38:29 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 40 | map(), filter(), reduce(), zip() |
Tim Peters | 8572b4f | 2001-05-06 01:05:02 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 41 | list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API) |
| 42 | max(), min() |
Tim Peters | de9725f | 2001-05-05 10:06:17 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 43 | .join() method of strings |
Tim Peters | 75f8e35 | 2001-05-05 11:33:43 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 44 | 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API) |
| 45 | operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API) |
Tim Peters | 75f8e35 | 2001-05-05 11:33:43 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 46 | |
Tim Peters | e63415e | 2001-05-08 04:38:29 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 47 | - Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even |
| 48 | if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==. |
| 49 | |
Tim Peters | 95bf939 | 2001-05-10 08:32:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame^] | 50 | - Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were |
| 51 | insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python |
| 52 | to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or |
| 53 | values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down. |
| 54 | |
Tim Peters | f553f89 | 2001-05-01 20:45:31 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 55 | |
Guido van Rossum | ffe13be | 2001-04-16 18:46:45 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 56 | What's New in Python 2.1 (final)? |
| 57 | ================================= |
| 58 | |
| 59 | We only changed a few things since the last release candidate, all in |
| 60 | Python library code: |
| 61 | |
| 62 | - A bug in the locale module was fixed that affected locales which |
| 63 | define no grouping for numeric formatting. |
| 64 | |
| 65 | - A few bugs in the weakref module's implementations of weak |
| 66 | dictionaries (WeakValueDictionary and WeakKeyDictionary) were fixed, |
| 67 | and the test suite was updated to check for these bugs. |
| 68 | |
| 69 | - An old bug in the os.path.walk() function (introduced in Python |
| 70 | 2.0!) was fixed: a non-existent file would cause an exception |
| 71 | instead of being ignored. |
| 72 | |
| 73 | - Fixed a few bugs in the new symtable module found by Neil Norwitz's |
| 74 | PyChecker. |
| 75 | |
| 76 | |
Guido van Rossum | 5b08f13 | 2001-04-16 02:05:23 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 77 | What's New in Python 2.1c2? |
| 78 | =========================== |
Barry Warsaw | 11e89c7 | 2001-04-11 20:37:57 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 79 | |
Guido van Rossum | 5b08f13 | 2001-04-16 02:05:23 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 80 | A flurry of small changes, and one showstopper fixed in the nick of |
| 81 | time made it necessary to release another release candidate. The list |
| 82 | here is the *complete* list of patches (except version updates): |
Guido van Rossum | 4fb6036 | 2001-04-13 00:46:14 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 83 | |
Guido van Rossum | 5b08f13 | 2001-04-16 02:05:23 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 84 | Core |
Guido van Rossum | 4fb6036 | 2001-04-13 00:46:14 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 85 | |
Guido van Rossum | 5b08f13 | 2001-04-16 02:05:23 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 86 | - Tim discovered a nasty bug in the dictionary code, caused by |
| 87 | PyDict_Next() calling dict_resize(), and the GC code's use of |
| 88 | PyDict_Next() violating an assumption in dict_items(). This was |
| 89 | fixed with considerable amounts of band-aid, but the net effect is a |
| 90 | saner and more robust implementation. |
| 91 | |
| 92 | - Made a bunch of symbols static that were accidentally global. |
| 93 | |
| 94 | Build and Ports |
| 95 | |
| 96 | - The setup.py script didn't check for a new enough version of zlib |
| 97 | (1.1.3 is needed). Now it does. |
| 98 | |
| 99 | - Changed "make clean" target to also remove shared libraries. |
| 100 | |
| 101 | - Added a more general warning about the SGI Irix optimizer to README. |
| 102 | |
| 103 | Library |
| 104 | |
| 105 | - Fix a bug in urllib.basejoin("http://host", "../file.html") which |
| 106 | omitted the slash between host and file.html. |
| 107 | |
| 108 | - The mailbox module's _Mailbox class contained a completely broken |
| 109 | and undocumented seek() method. Ripped it out. |
| 110 | |
| 111 | - Fixed a bunch of typos in various library modules (urllib2, smtpd, |
| 112 | sgmllib, netrc, chunk) found by Neil Norwitz's PyChecker. |
| 113 | |
| 114 | - Fixed a few last-minute bugs in unittest. |
| 115 | |
| 116 | Extensions |
| 117 | |
| 118 | - Reverted the patch to the OpenSSL code in socketmodule.c to support |
| 119 | RAND_status() and the EGD, and the subsequent patch that tried to |
| 120 | fix it for pre-0.9.5 versions; the problem with the patch is that on |
| 121 | some systems it issues a warning whenever socket is imported, and |
| 122 | that's unacceptable. |
| 123 | |
| 124 | Tests |
| 125 | |
| 126 | - Fixed the pickle tests to work with "import test.test_pickle". |
| 127 | |
| 128 | - Tweaked test_locale.py to actually run the test Windows. |
| 129 | |
| 130 | - In distutils/archive_util.py, call zipfile.ZipFile() with mode "w", |
| 131 | not "wb" (which is not a valid mode at all). |
| 132 | |
| 133 | - Fix pstats browser crashes. Import readline if it exists to make |
| 134 | the user interface nicer. |
| 135 | |
| 136 | - Add "import thread" to the top of test modules that import the |
| 137 | threading module (test_asynchat and test_threadedtempfile). This |
| 138 | prevents test failures caused by a broken threading module resulting |
| 139 | from a previously caught failed import. |
| 140 | |
| 141 | - Changed test_asynchat.py to set the SO_REUSEADDR option; this was |
| 142 | needed on some platforms (e.g. Solaris 8) when the tests are run |
| 143 | twice in succession. |
| 144 | |
| 145 | - Skip rather than fail test_sunaudiodev if no audio device is found. |
| 146 | |
| 147 | |
| 148 | What's New in Python 2.1c1? |
| 149 | =========================== |
| 150 | |
| 151 | This list was significantly updated when 2.1c2 was released; the 2.1c1 |
| 152 | release didn't mention most changes that were actually part of 2.1c1: |
| 153 | |
| 154 | Legal |
| 155 | |
| 156 | - Copyright was assigned to the Python Software Foundation (PSF) and a |
| 157 | PSF license (very similar to the CNRI license) was added. |
| 158 | |
| 159 | - The CNRI copyright notice was updated to include 2001. |
| 160 | |
| 161 | Core |
Barry Warsaw | 11e89c7 | 2001-04-11 20:37:57 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 162 | |
Guido van Rossum | c993272 | 2001-04-12 02:31:27 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 163 | - After a public outcry, assignment to __debug__ is no longer illegal; |
| 164 | instead, a warning is issued. It will become illegal in 2.2. |
| 165 | |
Guido van Rossum | 5b08f13 | 2001-04-16 02:05:23 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 166 | - Fixed a core dump with "%#x" % 0, and changed the semantics so that |
| 167 | "%#x" now always prepends "0x", even if the value is zero. |
| 168 | |
| 169 | - Fixed some nits in the bytecode compiler. |
| 170 | |
| 171 | - Fixed core dumps when calling certain kinds of non-functions. |
| 172 | |
| 173 | - Fixed various core dumps caused by reference count bugs. |
| 174 | |
| 175 | Build and Ports |
| 176 | |
| 177 | - Use INSTALL_SCRIPT to install script files. |
| 178 | |
Guido van Rossum | 34d37dc | 2001-04-11 21:03:32 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 179 | - New port: SCO Unixware 7, by Billy G. Allie. |
| 180 | |
Guido van Rossum | 5b08f13 | 2001-04-16 02:05:23 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 181 | - Updated RISCOS port. |
| 182 | |
| 183 | - Updated BeOS port and notes. |
| 184 | |
| 185 | - Various other porting problems resolved. |
| 186 | |
| 187 | Library |
| 188 | |
| 189 | - The TERMIOS and SOCKET modules are now truly obsolete and |
| 190 | unnecessary. Their symbols are incorporated in the termios and |
| 191 | socket modules. |
| 192 | |
| 193 | - Fixed some 64-bit bugs in pickle, cPickle, and struct, and added |
| 194 | better tests for pickling. |
| 195 | |
| 196 | - threading: make Condition.wait() robust against KeyboardInterrupt. |
| 197 | |
| 198 | - zipfile: add support to zipfile to support opening an archive |
| 199 | represented by an open file rather than a file name. Fix bug where |
| 200 | the archive was not properly closed. Fixed a bug in this bugfix |
| 201 | where flush() was called for a read-only file. |
| 202 | |
| 203 | - imputil: added an uninstall() method to the ImportManager. |
| 204 | |
| 205 | - Canvas: fixed bugs in lower() and tkraise() methods. |
| 206 | |
| 207 | - SocketServer: API change (added overridable close_request() method) |
| 208 | so that the TCP server can explicitly close the request. |
| 209 | |
| 210 | - pstats: Eric Raymond added a simple interactive statistics browser, |
| 211 | invoked when the module is run as a script. |
| 212 | |
| 213 | - locale: fixed a problem in format(). |
| 214 | |
| 215 | - webbrowser: made it work when the BROWSER environment variable has a |
| 216 | value like "/usr/bin/netscape". Made it auto-detect Konqueror for |
| 217 | KDE 2. Fixed some other nits. |
| 218 | |
| 219 | - unittest: changes to allow using a different exception than |
| 220 | AssertionError, and added a few more function aliases. Some other |
| 221 | small changes. |
| 222 | |
| 223 | - urllib, urllib2: fixed redirect problems and a coupleof other nits. |
| 224 | |
| 225 | - asynchat: fixed a critical bug in asynchat that slipped through the |
| 226 | 2.1b2 release. Fixed another rare bug. |
| 227 | |
| 228 | - Fix some unqualified except: clauses (always a bad code example). |
| 229 | |
| 230 | XML |
| 231 | |
| 232 | - pyexpat: new API get_version_string(). |
| 233 | |
| 234 | - Fixed some minidom bugs. |
| 235 | |
| 236 | Extensions |
| 237 | |
| 238 | - Fixed a core dump in _weakref. Removed the weakref.mapping() |
| 239 | function (it adds nothing to the API). |
| 240 | |
| 241 | - Rationalized the use of header files in the readline module, to make |
| 242 | it compile (albeit with some warnings) with the very recent readline |
| 243 | 4.2, without breaking for earlier versions. |
| 244 | |
| 245 | - Hopefully fixed a buffering problem in linuxaudiodev. |
| 246 | |
| 247 | - Attempted a fix to make the OpenSSL support in the socket module |
| 248 | work again with pre-0.9.5 versions of OpenSSL. |
| 249 | |
| 250 | Tests |
| 251 | |
| 252 | - Added a test case for asynchat and asyncore. |
| 253 | |
| 254 | - Removed coupling between tests where one test failing could break |
| 255 | another. |
| 256 | |
| 257 | Tools |
| 258 | |
| 259 | - Ping added an interactive help browser to pydoc, fixed some nits |
| 260 | in the rest of the pydoc code, and added some features to his |
| 261 | inspect module. |
| 262 | |
| 263 | - An updated python-mode.el version 4.1 which integrates Ken |
| 264 | Manheimer's pdbtrack.el. This makes debugging Python code via pdb |
| 265 | much nicer in XEmacs and Emacs. When stepping through your program |
| 266 | with pdb, in either the shell window or the *Python* window, the |
| 267 | source file and line will be tracked by an arrow. Very cool! |
| 268 | |
| 269 | - IDLE: syntax warnings in interactive mode are changed into errors. |
| 270 | |
| 271 | - Some improvements to Tools/webchecker (ignore some more URL types, |
Tim Peters | 0e57abf | 2001-05-02 07:39:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 272 | follow some more links). |
Guido van Rossum | 5b08f13 | 2001-04-16 02:05:23 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 273 | |
| 274 | - Brought the Tools/compiler package up to date. |
Guido van Rossum | 34d37dc | 2001-04-11 21:03:32 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 275 | |
Barry Warsaw | 11e89c7 | 2001-04-11 20:37:57 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 276 | |
Martin v. Löwis | 0411f6f | 2001-03-21 08:01:39 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 277 | What's New in Python 2.1 beta 2? |
| 278 | ================================ |
| 279 | |
Guido van Rossum | 053ae35 | 2001-03-22 14:17:21 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 280 | (Unlisted are many fixed bugs, more documentation, etc.) |
| 281 | |
Martin v. Löwis | 0411f6f | 2001-03-21 08:01:39 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 282 | Core language, builtins, and interpreter |
| 283 | |
Guido van Rossum | 053ae35 | 2001-03-22 14:17:21 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 284 | - The nested scopes work (enabled by "from __future__ import |
| 285 | nested_scopes") is completed; in particular, the future now extends |
| 286 | into code executed through exec, eval() and execfile(), and into the |
| 287 | interactive interpreter. |
| 288 | |
| 289 | - When calling a base class method (e.g. BaseClass.__init__(self)), |
| 290 | this is now allowed even if self is not strictly spoken a class |
| 291 | instance (e.g. when using metaclasses or the Don Beaudry hook). |
| 292 | |
| 293 | - Slice objects are now comparable but not hashable; this prevents |
| 294 | dict[:] from being accepted but meaningless. |
| 295 | |
| 296 | - Complex division is now calculated using less braindead algorithms. |
| 297 | This doesn't change semantics except it's more likely to give useful |
| 298 | results in extreme cases. Complex repr() now uses full precision |
| 299 | like float repr(). |
| 300 | |
| 301 | - sgmllib.py now calls handle_decl() for simple <!...> declarations. |
| 302 | |
Jeremy Hylton | f626db7 | 2001-03-23 14:18:27 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 303 | - It is illegal to assign to the name __debug__, which is set when the |
| 304 | interpreter starts. It is effectively a compile-time constant. |
| 305 | |
| 306 | - A warning will be issued if a global statement for a variable |
| 307 | follows a use or assignment of that variable. |
| 308 | |
Martin v. Löwis | 0411f6f | 2001-03-21 08:01:39 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 309 | Standard library |
| 310 | |
Guido van Rossum | 053ae35 | 2001-03-22 14:17:21 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 311 | - unittest.py, a unit testing framework by Steve Purcell (PyUNIT, |
| 312 | inspired by JUnit), is now part of the standard library. You now |
| 313 | have a choice of two testing frameworks: unittest requires you to |
| 314 | write testcases as separate code, doctest gathers them from |
| 315 | docstrings. Both approaches have their advantages and |
| 316 | disadvantages. |
| 317 | |
| 318 | - A new module Tix was added, which wraps the Tix extension library |
| 319 | for Tk. With that module, it is not necessary to statically link |
| 320 | Tix with _tkinter, since Tix will be loaded with Tcl's "package |
| 321 | require" command. See Demo/tix/. |
| 322 | |
| 323 | - tzparse.py is now obsolete. |
| 324 | |
| 325 | - In gzip.py, the seek() and tell() methods are removed -- they were |
| 326 | non-functional anyway, and it's better if callers can test for their |
| 327 | existence with hasattr(). |
| 328 | |
| 329 | Python/C API |
| 330 | |
| 331 | - PyDict_Next(): it is now safe to call PyDict_SetItem() with a key |
| 332 | that's already in the dictionary during a PyDict_Next() iteration. |
| 333 | This used to fail occasionally when a dictionary resize operation |
| 334 | could be triggered that would rehash all the keys. All other |
| 335 | modifications to the dictionary are still off-limits during a |
| 336 | PyDict_Next() iteration! |
| 337 | |
| 338 | - New extended APIs related to passing compiler variables around. |
| 339 | |
| 340 | - New abstract APIs PyObject_IsInstance(), PyObject_IsSubclass() |
| 341 | implement isinstance() and issubclass(). |
| 342 | |
| 343 | - Py_BuildValue() now has a "D" conversion to create a Python complex |
| 344 | number from a Py_complex C value. |
Martin v. Löwis | 0411f6f | 2001-03-21 08:01:39 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 345 | |
Fred Drake | 4e262a9 | 2001-03-22 18:26:47 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 346 | - Extensions types which support weak references must now set the |
| 347 | field allocated for the weak reference machinery to NULL themselves; |
| 348 | this is done to avoid the cost of checking each object for having a |
| 349 | weakly referencable type in PyObject_INIT(), since most types are |
| 350 | not weakly referencable. |
| 351 | |
Jeremy Hylton | f626db7 | 2001-03-23 14:18:27 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 352 | - PyFrame_FastToLocals() and PyFrame_LocalsToFast() copy bindings for |
| 353 | free variables and cell variables to and from the frame's f_locals. |
| 354 | |
| 355 | - Variants of several functions defined in pythonrun.h have been added |
| 356 | to support the nested_scopes future statement. The variants all end |
| 357 | in Flags and take an extra argument, a PyCompilerFlags *; examples: |
| 358 | PyRun_AnyFileExFlags(), PyRun_InteractiveLoopFlags(). These |
| 359 | variants may be removed in Python 2.2, when nested scopes are |
Tim Peters | 0e57abf | 2001-05-02 07:39:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 360 | mandatory. |
Jeremy Hylton | f626db7 | 2001-03-23 14:18:27 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 361 | |
Andrew M. Kuchling | 8e9972c | 2001-03-22 15:42:08 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 362 | Distutils |
| 363 | |
| 364 | - the sdist command now writes a PKG-INFO file, as described in PEP 241, |
| 365 | into the release tree. |
| 366 | |
Tim Peters | 0e57abf | 2001-05-02 07:39:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 367 | - several enhancements to the bdist_wininst command from Thomas Heller |
Andrew M. Kuchling | 8e9972c | 2001-03-22 15:42:08 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 368 | (an uninstaller, more customization of the installer's display) |
| 369 | |
| 370 | - from Jack Jansen: added Mac-specific code to generate a dialog for |
| 371 | users to specify the command-line (because providing a command-line with |
Tim Peters | 0e57abf | 2001-05-02 07:39:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 372 | MacPython is awkward). Jack also made various fixes for the Mac |
Andrew M. Kuchling | 8e9972c | 2001-03-22 15:42:08 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 373 | and the Metrowerks compiler. |
Tim Peters | 0e57abf | 2001-05-02 07:39:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 374 | |
| 375 | - added 'platforms' and 'keywords' to the set of metadata that can be |
| 376 | specified for a distribution. |
Andrew M. Kuchling | 8e9972c | 2001-03-22 15:42:08 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 377 | |
| 378 | - applied patches from Jason Tishler to make the compiler class work with |
| 379 | Cygwin. |
| 380 | |
| 381 | |
Tim Peters | 2fe289a | 2001-03-01 22:19:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 382 | What's New in Python 2.1 beta 1? |
| 383 | ================================ |
Tim Peters | d66595f | 2001-02-04 03:09:53 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 384 | |
| 385 | Core language, builtins, and interpreter |
| 386 | |
Guido van Rossum | 9d0fbde | 2001-03-02 14:00:32 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 387 | - Following an outcry from the community about the amount of code |
| 388 | broken by the nested scopes feature introduced in 2.1a2, we decided |
| 389 | to make this feature optional, and to wait until Python 2.2 (or at |
| 390 | least 6 months) to make it standard. The option can be enabled on a |
| 391 | per-module basis by adding "from __future__ import nested_scopes" at |
| 392 | the beginning of a module (before any other statements, but after |
| 393 | comments and an optional docstring). See PEP 236 (Back to the |
| 394 | __future__) for a description of the __future__ statement. PEP 227 |
| 395 | (Statically Nested Scopes) has been updated to reflect this change, |
| 396 | and to clarify the semantics in a number of endcases. |
| 397 | |
| 398 | - The nested scopes code, when enabled, has been hardened, and most |
| 399 | bugs and memory leaks in it have been fixed. |
| 400 | |
| 401 | - Compile-time warnings are now generated for a number of conditions |
| 402 | that will break or change in meaning when nested scopes are enabled: |
| 403 | |
| 404 | - Using "from...import *" or "exec" without in-clause in a function |
| 405 | scope that also defines a lambda or nested function with one or |
| 406 | more free (non-local) variables. The presence of the import* or |
| 407 | bare exec makes it impossible for the compiler to determine the |
| 408 | exact set of local variables in the outer scope, which makes it |
| 409 | impossible to determine the bindings for free variables in the |
| 410 | inner scope. To avoid the warning about import *, change it into |
| 411 | an import of explicitly name object, or move the import* statement |
| 412 | to the global scope; to avoid the warning about bare exec, use |
| 413 | exec...in... (a good idea anyway -- there's a possibility that |
| 414 | bare exec will be deprecated in the future). |
| 415 | |
| 416 | - Use of a global variable in a nested scope with the same name as a |
| 417 | local variable in a surrounding scope. This will change in |
| 418 | meaning with nested scopes: the name in the inner scope will |
| 419 | reference the variable in the outer scope rather than the global |
| 420 | of the same name. To avoid the warning, either rename the outer |
| 421 | variable, or use a global statement in the inner function. |
| 422 | |
Neil Schemenauer | a35c688 | 2001-02-27 04:45:05 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 423 | - An optional object allocator has been included. This allocator is |
| 424 | optimized for Python objects and should be faster and use less memory |
| 425 | than the standard system allocator. It is not enabled by default |
| 426 | because of possible thread safety problems. The allocator is only |
| 427 | protected by the Python interpreter lock and it is possible that some |
| 428 | extension modules require a thread safe allocator. The object |
| 429 | allocator can be enabled by providing the "--with-pymalloc" option to |
| 430 | configure. |
| 431 | |
Tim Peters | d66595f | 2001-02-04 03:09:53 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 432 | Standard library |
| 433 | |
Martin v. Löwis | 2a5130e | 2001-02-27 04:21:58 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 434 | - pyexpat now detects the expat version if expat.h defines it. A |
| 435 | number of additional handlers are provided, which are only available |
| 436 | since expat 1.95. In addition, the methods SetParamEntityParsing and |
| 437 | GetInputContext of Parser objects are available with 1.95.x |
| 438 | only. Parser objects now provide the ordered_attributes and |
| 439 | specified_attributes attributes. A new module expat.model was added, |
| 440 | which offers a number of additional constants if 1.95.x is used. |
| 441 | |
| 442 | - xml.dom offers the new functions registerDOMImplementation and |
| 443 | getDOMImplementation. |
| 444 | |
| 445 | - xml.dom.minidom offers a toprettyxml method. A number of DOM |
| 446 | conformance issues have been resolved. In particular, Element now |
| 447 | has an hasAttributes method, and the handling of namespaces was |
| 448 | improved. |
| 449 | |
Andrew M. Kuchling | d6a1d79 | 2001-02-28 21:05:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 450 | - Ka-Ping Yee contributed two new modules: inspect.py, a module for |
| 451 | getting information about live Python code, and pydoc.py, a module |
| 452 | for interactively converting docstrings to HTML or text. |
| 453 | Tools/scripts/pydoc, which is now automatically installed into |
Tim Peters | 1eff796 | 2001-03-01 02:31:33 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 454 | <prefix>/bin, uses pydoc.py to display documentation; try running |
Guido van Rossum | e3955a8 | 2001-03-02 14:05:59 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 455 | "pydoc -h" for instructions. "pydoc -g" pops up a small GUI that |
| 456 | lets you browse the module docstrings using a web browser. |
Andrew M. Kuchling | d6a1d79 | 2001-02-28 21:05:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 457 | |
Tim Peters | 1eff796 | 2001-03-01 02:31:33 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 458 | - New library module difflib.py, primarily packaging the SequenceMatcher |
| 459 | class at the heart of the popular ndiff.py file-comparison tool. |
| 460 | |
| 461 | - doctest.py (a framework for verifying Python code examples in docstrings) |
| 462 | is now part of the std library. |
| 463 | |
Tim Peters | d66595f | 2001-02-04 03:09:53 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 464 | Windows changes |
| 465 | |
Guido van Rossum | e3955a8 | 2001-03-02 14:05:59 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 466 | - A new entry in the Start menu, "Module Docs", runs "pydoc -g" -- a |
| 467 | small GUI that lets you browse the module docstrings using your |
| 468 | default web browser. |
| 469 | |
Tim Peters | 1eff796 | 2001-03-01 02:31:33 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 470 | - Import is now case-sensitive. PEP 235 (Import on Case-Insensitive |
| 471 | Platforms) is implemented. See |
| 472 | |
| 473 | http://python.sourceforge.net/peps/pep-0235.html |
| 474 | |
| 475 | for full details, especially the "Current Lower-Left Semantics" section. |
| 476 | The new Windows import rules are simpler than before: |
| 477 | |
| 478 | A. If the PYTHONCASEOK environment variable exists, same as |
| 479 | before: silently accept the first case-insensitive match of any |
| 480 | kind; raise ImportError if none found. |
| 481 | |
| 482 | B. Else search sys.path for the first case-sensitive match; raise |
| 483 | ImportError if none found. |
| 484 | |
| 485 | The same rules have been implented on other platforms with case- |
| 486 | insensitive but case-preserving filesystems too (including Cygwin, and |
| 487 | several flavors of Macintosh operating systems). |
Tim Peters | d66595f | 2001-02-04 03:09:53 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 488 | |
Tim Peters | 25a9ce3 | 2001-02-19 07:06:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 489 | - winsound module: Under Win9x, winsound.Beep() now attempts to simulate |
| 490 | what it's supposed to do (and does do under NT and 2000) via direct |
| 491 | port manipulation. It's unknown whether this will work on all systems, |
Tim Peters | 1eff796 | 2001-03-01 02:31:33 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 492 | 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] | 493 | all Win9x systems before. |
| 494 | |
Tim Peters | 1eff796 | 2001-03-01 02:31:33 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 495 | - Build: Subproject _test (effectively) renamed to _testcapi. |
| 496 | |
Tim Peters | 2fe289a | 2001-03-01 22:19:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 497 | New platforms |
| 498 | |
| 499 | - 2.1 should compile and run out of the box under MacOS X, even using HFS+. |
| 500 | Thanks to Steven Majewski! |
| 501 | |
| 502 | - 2.1 should compile and run out of the box on Cygwin. Thanks to Jason |
| 503 | Tishler! |
| 504 | |
Guido van Rossum | 9089b27 | 2001-03-02 06:49:50 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 505 | - 2.1 contains new files and patches for RISCOS, thanks to Dietmar |
| 506 | Schwertberger! See RISCOS/README for more information -- it seems |
| 507 | that because of the bizarre filename conventions on RISCOS, no port |
| 508 | to that platform is easy. Note that the new variable os.endsep is |
| 509 | silently supported in order to make life easier on this platform, |
| 510 | but we don't advertise it because it's not worth for most folks to |
| 511 | care about RISCOS portability. |
| 512 | |
Tim Peters | 25a9ce3 | 2001-02-19 07:06:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 513 | |
Tim Peters | d7b5e88 | 2001-01-25 03:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 514 | What's New in Python 2.1 alpha 2? |
| 515 | ================================= |
Tim Peters | 40ead76 | 2001-01-27 05:35:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 516 | |
Tim Peters | d7b5e88 | 2001-01-25 03:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 517 | Core language, builtins, and interpreter |
| 518 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 4589bd8 | 2001-02-01 20:38:45 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 519 | - Scopes nest. If a name is used in a function or class, but is not |
| 520 | local, the definition in the nearest enclosing function scope will |
| 521 | be used. One consequence of this change is that lambda statements |
| 522 | could reference variables in the namespaces where the lambda is |
| 523 | defined. In some unusual cases, this change will break code. |
| 524 | |
| 525 | In all previous version of Python, names were resolved in exactly |
| 526 | three namespaces -- the local namespace, the global namespace, and |
Jeremy Hylton | d6b1cf9 | 2001-02-02 20:06:28 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 527 | the builtin namespace. According to this old definition, if a |
Jeremy Hylton | 4589bd8 | 2001-02-01 20:38:45 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 528 | function A is defined within a function B, the names bound in B are |
| 529 | not visible in A. The new rules make names bound in B visible in A, |
| 530 | unless A contains a name binding that hides the binding in B. |
| 531 | |
| 532 | Section 4.1 of the reference manual describes the new scoping rules |
| 533 | in detail. The test script in Lib/test/test_scope.py demonstrates |
| 534 | some of the effects of the change. |
| 535 | |
| 536 | The new rules will cause existing code to break if it defines nested |
| 537 | functions where an outer function has local variables with the same |
| 538 | name as globals or builtins used by the inner function. Example: |
| 539 | |
| 540 | def munge(str): |
| 541 | def helper(x): |
| 542 | return str(x) |
| 543 | if type(str) != type(''): |
| 544 | str = helper(str) |
| 545 | return str.strip() |
| 546 | |
| 547 | Under the old rules, the name str in helper() is bound to the |
| 548 | builtin function str(). Under the new rules, it will be bound to |
| 549 | the argument named str and an error will occur when helper() is |
| 550 | called. |
| 551 | |
Jeremy Hylton | d6b1cf9 | 2001-02-02 20:06:28 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 552 | - The compiler will report a SyntaxError if "from ... import *" occurs |
| 553 | in a function or class scope. The language reference has documented |
| 554 | that this case is illegal, but the compiler never checked for it. |
| 555 | The recent introduction of nested scope makes the meaning of this |
| 556 | form of name binding ambiguous. In a future release, the compiler |
| 557 | may allow this form when there is no possibility of ambiguity. |
| 558 | |
Tim Peters | 40ead76 | 2001-01-27 05:35:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 559 | - repr(string) is easier to read, now using hex escapes instead of octal, |
| 560 | and using \t, \n and \r instead of \011, \012 and \015 (respectively): |
| 561 | |
| 562 | >>> "\texample \r\n" + chr(0) + chr(255) |
| 563 | '\texample \r\n\x00\xff' # in 2.1 |
| 564 | '\011example \015\012\000\377' # in 2.0 |
| 565 | |
Moshe Zadka | 6af0ce0 | 2001-01-29 06:41:00 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 566 | - Functions are now compared and hashed by identity, not by value, since |
| 567 | the func_code attribute is writable. |
| 568 | |
Fred Drake | fb9d712 | 2001-02-01 20:00:40 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 569 | - Weak references (PEP 205) have been added. This involves a few |
| 570 | changes in the core, an extension module (_weakref), and a Python |
| 571 | module (weakref). The weakref module is the public interface. It |
| 572 | includes support for "explicit" weak references, proxy objects, and |
| 573 | mappings with weakly held values. |
| 574 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 0072d5a | 2001-02-01 22:53:15 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 575 | - A 'continue' statement can now appear in a try block within the body |
| 576 | 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] | 577 | clause. |
Jeremy Hylton | 0072d5a | 2001-02-01 22:53:15 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 578 | |
Tim Peters | d7b5e88 | 2001-01-25 03:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 579 | Standard library |
| 580 | |
Barry Warsaw | 30dbd14 | 2001-01-31 22:14:01 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 581 | - mailbox.py now has a new class, PortableUnixMailbox which is |
| 582 | identical to UnixMailbox but uses a more portable scheme for |
| 583 | determining From_ separators. Also, the constructors for all the |
| 584 | classes in this module have a new optional `factory' argument, which |
| 585 | is a callable used when new message classes must be instantiated by |
| 586 | the next() method. |
| 587 | |
Tim Peters | d7b5e88 | 2001-01-25 03:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 588 | - random.py is now self-contained, and offers all the functionality of |
| 589 | the now-deprecated whrandom.py. See the docs for details. random.py |
| 590 | also supports new functions getstate() and setstate(), for saving |
Tim Peters | d52269b | 2001-01-25 06:23:18 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 591 | and restoring the internal state of the generator; and jumpahead(n), |
| 592 | for quickly forcing the internal state to be the same as if n calls to |
| 593 | random() had been made. The latter is particularly useful for multi- |
| 594 | threaded programs, creating one instance of the random.Random() class for |
| 595 | each thread, then using .jumpahead() to force each instance to use a |
| 596 | non-overlapping segment of the full period. |
Tim Peters | d7b5e88 | 2001-01-25 03:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 597 | |
Tim Peters | 0de88fc | 2001-02-01 04:59:18 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 598 | - random.py's seed() function is new. For bit-for-bit compatibility with |
| 599 | prior releases, use the whseed function instead. The new seed function |
| 600 | addresses two problems: (1) The old function couldn't produce more than |
| 601 | about 2**24 distinct internal states; the new one about 2**45 (the best |
| 602 | that can be done in the Wichmann-Hill generator). (2) The old function |
| 603 | sometimes produced identical internal states when passed distinct |
| 604 | integers, and there was no simple way to predict when that would happen; |
| 605 | the new one guarantees to produce distinct internal states for all |
| 606 | arguments in [0, 27814431486576L). |
| 607 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 4c4fda0 | 2001-02-02 03:29:24 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 608 | - The socket module now supports raw packets on Linux. The socket |
| 609 | family is AF_PACKET. |
| 610 | |
Tim Peters | 9ea17ac | 2001-02-02 05:57:15 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 611 | - test_capi.py is a start at running tests of the Python C API. The tests |
| 612 | are implemented by the new Modules/_testmodule.c. |
| 613 | |
Jeremy Hylton | d6b1cf9 | 2001-02-02 20:06:28 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 614 | - A new extension module, _symtable, provides provisional access to the |
| 615 | internal symbol table used by the Python compiler. A higher-level |
| 616 | interface will be added on top of _symtable in a future release. |
| 617 | |
Andrew M. Kuchling | debc352 | 2001-02-22 15:53:21 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 618 | - Removed the obsolete soundex module. |
| 619 | |
Martin v. Löwis | 2a5130e | 2001-02-27 04:21:58 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 620 | - xml.dom.minidom now uses the standard DOM exceptions. Node supports |
| 621 | the isSameNode method; NamedNodeMap the get method. |
| 622 | |
| 623 | - xml.sax.expatreader supports the lexical handler property; it |
| 624 | generates comment, startCDATA, and endCDATA events. |
| 625 | |
Tim Peters | ee826f8 | 2001-01-31 19:39:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 626 | Windows changes |
| 627 | |
| 628 | - Build procedure: the zlib project is built in a different way that |
| 629 | 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] | 630 | the zlib binary used. See PCbuild\readme.txt for details. Your old |
| 631 | zlib-related directories can be deleted; you'll need to download fresh |
| 632 | source for zlib and unpack it into a new directory. |
Tim Peters | ee826f8 | 2001-01-31 19:39:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 633 | |
Tim Peters | 9ea17ac | 2001-02-02 05:57:15 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 634 | - Build: New subproject _test for the benefit of test_capi.py (see above). |
| 635 | |
Tim Peters | b16c56f | 2001-02-02 21:24:51 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 636 | - Build: New subproject _symtable, for new DLL _symtable.pyd (a nascent |
| 637 | interface to some Python compiler internals). |
| 638 | |
| 639 | - Build: Subproject ucnhash is gone, since the code was folded into the |
Tim Peters | 9ea17ac | 2001-02-02 05:57:15 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 640 | unicodedata subproject. |
Tim Peters | d7b5e88 | 2001-01-25 03:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 641 | |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 642 | What's New in Python 2.1 alpha 1? |
| 643 | ================================= |
| 644 | |
| 645 | Core language, builtins, and interpreter |
| 646 | |
Marc-André Lemburg | ebb195b | 2001-01-20 10:34:52 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 647 | - There is a new Unicode companion to the PyObject_Str() API |
| 648 | called PyObject_Unicode(). It behaves in the same way as the |
| 649 | former, but assures that the returned value is an Unicode object |
| 650 | (applying the usual coercion if necessary). |
Marc-André Lemburg | ad7c98e | 2001-01-17 17:09:53 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 651 | |
Guido van Rossum | f98eda0 | 2001-01-17 15:54:45 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 652 | - The comparison operators support "rich comparison overloading" (PEP |
| 653 | 207). C extension types can provide a rich comparison function in |
| 654 | the new tp_richcompare slot in the type object. The cmp() function |
| 655 | and the C function PyObject_Compare() first try the new rich |
| 656 | comparison operators before trying the old 3-way comparison. There |
| 657 | is also a new C API PyObject_RichCompare() (which also falls back on |
| 658 | the old 3-way comparison, but does not constrain the outcome of the |
| 659 | rich comparison to a Boolean result). |
| 660 | |
| 661 | The rich comparison function takes two objects (at least one of |
| 662 | which is guaranteed to have the type that provided the function) and |
| 663 | an integer indicating the opcode, which can be Py_LT, Py_LE, Py_EQ, |
| 664 | Py_NE, Py_GT, Py_GE (for <, <=, ==, !=, >, >=), and returns a Python |
| 665 | object, which may be NotImplemented (in which case the tp_compare |
| 666 | slot function is used as a fallback, if defined). |
| 667 | |
| 668 | Classes can overload individual comparison operators by defining one |
| 669 | or more of the methods__lt__, __le__, __eq__, __ne__, __gt__, |
Guido van Rossum | a88479f | 2001-01-18 14:28:08 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 670 | __ge__. There are no explicit "reflected argument" versions of |
| 671 | these; instead, __lt__ and __gt__ are each other's reflection, |
| 672 | likewise for__le__ and __ge__; __eq__ and __ne__ are their own |
| 673 | reflection (similar at the C level). No other implications are |
| 674 | made; in particular, Python does not assume that == is the Boolean |
| 675 | inverse of !=, or that < is the Boolean inverse of >=. This makes |
| 676 | it possible to define types with partial orderings. |
Guido van Rossum | f98eda0 | 2001-01-17 15:54:45 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 677 | |
| 678 | Classes or types that want to implement (in)equality tests but not |
| 679 | the ordering operators (i.e. unordered types) should implement == |
| 680 | and !=, and raise an error for the ordering operators. |
| 681 | |
Guido van Rossum | a88479f | 2001-01-18 14:28:08 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 682 | 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] | 683 | Boolean; e.g. a matrix type might want to return a matrix of bits |
| 684 | for A < B, giving elementwise comparisons. Such types should ensure |
| 685 | that any interpretation of their value in a Boolean context raises |
| 686 | an exception, e.g. by defining __nonzero__ (or the tp_nonzero slot |
| 687 | at the C level) to always raise an exception. |
| 688 | |
Guido van Rossum | a88479f | 2001-01-18 14:28:08 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 689 | - Complex numbers use rich comparisons to define == and != but raise |
| 690 | an exception for <, <=, > and >=. Unfortunately, this also means |
| 691 | that cmp() of two complex numbers raises an exception when the two |
| 692 | numbers differ. Since it is not mathematically meaningful to compare |
| 693 | complex numbers except for equality, I hope that this doesn't break |
| 694 | too much code. |
| 695 | |
Tim Peters | 3389f19 | 2001-02-18 08:48:49 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 696 | - The outcome of comparing non-numeric objects of different types is |
Tim Peters | 1449585 | 2001-02-18 08:28:33 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 697 | not defined by the language, other than that it's arbitrary but |
| 698 | consistent (see the Reference Manual). An implementation detail changed |
| 699 | in 2.1a1 such that None now compares less than any other object. Code |
| 700 | relying on this new behavior (like code that relied on the previous |
| 701 | behavior) does so at its own risk. |
| 702 | |
Barry Warsaw | 573b541 | 2001-01-15 20:43:18 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 703 | - Functions and methods now support getting and setting arbitrarily |
| 704 | named attributes (PEP 232). Functions have a new __dict__ |
| 705 | (a.k.a. func_dict) which hold the function attributes. Methods get |
| 706 | and set attributes on their underlying im_func. It is a TypeError |
| 707 | to set an attribute on a bound method. |
| 708 | |
Guido van Rossum | 051e335 | 2001-01-15 19:11:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 709 | - The xrange() object implementation has been improved so that |
| 710 | xrange(sys.maxint) can be used on 64-bit platforms. There's still a |
| 711 | limitation that in this case len(xrange(sys.maxint)) can't be |
| 712 | calculated, but the common idiom "for i in xrange(sys.maxint)" will |
| 713 | work fine as long as the index i doesn't actually reach 2**31. |
| 714 | (Python uses regular ints for sequence and string indices; fixing |
| 715 | that is much more work.) |
| 716 | |
Guido van Rossum | 1cc8f83 | 2001-01-12 16:25:08 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 717 | - Two changes to from...import: |
| 718 | |
Guido van Rossum | ba38123 | 2001-02-03 15:06:40 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 719 | 1) "from M import X" now works even if (after loading module M) |
| 720 | sys.modules['M'] is not a real module; it's basically a getattr() |
| 721 | operation with AttributeError exceptions changed into ImportError. |
Guido van Rossum | 1cc8f83 | 2001-01-12 16:25:08 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 722 | |
| 723 | 2) "from M import *" now looks for M.__all__ to decide which names to |
| 724 | import; if M.__all__ doesn't exist, it uses M.__dict__.keys() but |
| 725 | filters out names starting with '_' as before. Whether or not |
| 726 | __all__ exists, there's no restriction on the type of M. |
| 727 | |
Guido van Rossum | f61f166 | 2001-01-10 20:13:55 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 728 | - File objects have a new method, xreadlines(). This is the fastest |
| 729 | way to iterate over all lines in a file: |
| 730 | |
| 731 | for line in file.xreadlines(): |
| 732 | ...do something to line... |
| 733 | |
| 734 | See the xreadlines module (mentioned below) for how to do this for |
| 735 | other file-like objects. |
| 736 | |
| 737 | - Even if you don't use file.xreadlines(), you may expect a speedup on |
| 738 | line-by-line input. The file.readline() method has been optimized |
Tim Peters | f29b64d | 2001-01-15 06:33:19 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 739 | quite a bit in platform-specific ways: on systems (like Linux) that |
| 740 | support flockfile(), getc_unlocked(), and funlockfile(), those are |
| 741 | used by default. On systems (like Windows) without getc_unlocked(), |
| 742 | a complicated (but still thread-safe) method using fgets() is used by |
| 743 | default. |
| 744 | |
Tim Peters | d52269b | 2001-01-25 06:23:18 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 745 | You can force use of the fgets() method by #define'ing |
| 746 | USE_FGETS_IN_GETLINE at build time (it may be faster than |
Tim Peters | f29b64d | 2001-01-15 06:33:19 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 747 | getc_unlocked()). |
| 748 | |
Tim Peters | d52269b | 2001-01-25 06:23:18 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 749 | You can force fgets() not to be used by #define'ing |
| 750 | 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] | 751 | test_bufio.py fails -- and let us know if it does!). |
| 752 | |
| 753 | - In addition, the fileinput module, while still slower than the other |
| 754 | methods on most platforms, has been sped up too, by using |
| 755 | file.readlines(sizehint). |
Guido van Rossum | f61f166 | 2001-01-10 20:13:55 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 756 | |
| 757 | - Support for run-time warnings has been added, including a new |
| 758 | command line option (-W) to specify the disposition of warnings. |
| 759 | See the description of the warnings module below. |
| 760 | |
| 761 | - Extensive changes have been made to the coercion code. This mostly |
| 762 | affects extension modules (which can now implement mixed-type |
| 763 | numerical operators without having to use coercion), but |
| 764 | occasionally, in boundary cases the coercion semantics have changed |
| 765 | 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] | 766 | is considered an improvement. Also note that __rcmp__ is no longer |
Guido van Rossum | f61f166 | 2001-01-10 20:13:55 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 767 | supported -- instead of calling __rcmp__, __cmp__ is called with |
Guido van Rossum | a88479f | 2001-01-18 14:28:08 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 768 | reflected arguments. |
Guido van Rossum | f61f166 | 2001-01-10 20:13:55 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 769 | |
Guido van Rossum | f98eda0 | 2001-01-17 15:54:45 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 770 | - In connection with the coercion changes, a new built-in singleton |
| 771 | object, NotImplemented is defined. This can be returned for |
| 772 | operations that wish to indicate they are not implemented for a |
| 773 | particular combination of arguments. From C, this is |
| 774 | Py_NotImplemented. |
| 775 | |
Martin v. Löwis | be4c0f5 | 2001-01-04 20:30:56 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 776 | - The interpreter accepts now bytecode files on the command line even |
| 777 | if they do not have a .pyc or .pyo extension. On Linux, after executing |
| 778 | |
Martin v. Löwis | e214baa | 2001-02-04 22:37:56 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 779 | import imp,sys,string |
| 780 | magic = string.join(["\\x%.2x" % ord(c) for c in imp.get_magic()],"") |
| 781 | reg = ':pyc:M::%s::%s:' % (magic, sys.executable) |
| 782 | open("/proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register","wb").write(reg) |
Martin v. Löwis | be4c0f5 | 2001-01-04 20:30:56 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 783 | |
| 784 | any byte code file can be used as an executable (i.e. as an argument |
| 785 | to execve(2)). |
| 786 | |
Tim Peters | 9940b80 | 2000-12-01 07:59:35 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 787 | - %[xXo] formats of negative Python longs now produce a sign |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 788 | character. In 1.6 and earlier, they never produced a sign, |
| 789 | and raised an error if the value of the long was too large |
| 790 | to fit in a Python int. In 2.0, they produced a sign if and |
| 791 | only if too large to fit in an int. This was inconsistent |
| 792 | across platforms (because the size of an int varies across |
| 793 | platforms), and inconsistent with hex() and oct(). Example: |
| 794 | |
| 795 | >>> "%x" % -0x42L |
Tim Peters | 9940b80 | 2000-12-01 07:59:35 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 796 | '-42' # in 2.1 |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 797 | 'ffffffbe' # in 2.0 and before, on 32-bit machines |
| 798 | >>> hex(-0x42L) |
| 799 | '-0x42L' # in all versions of Python |
| 800 | |
Tim Peters | 9940b80 | 2000-12-01 07:59:35 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 801 | The behavior of %d formats for negative Python longs remains |
| 802 | the same as in 2.0 (although in 1.6 and before, they raised |
| 803 | an error if the long didn't fit in a Python int). |
| 804 | |
| 805 | %u formats don't make sense for Python longs, but are allowed |
| 806 | and treated the same as %d in 2.1. In 2.0, a negative long |
| 807 | formatted via %u produced a sign if and only if too large to |
| 808 | fit in an int. In 1.6 and earlier, a negative long formatted |
| 809 | via %u raised an error if it was too big to fit in an int. |
| 810 | |
Guido van Rossum | 3661d39 | 2000-12-12 22:10:31 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 811 | - Dictionary objects have an odd new method, popitem(). This removes |
| 812 | an arbitrary item from the dictionary and returns it (in the form of |
| 813 | a (key, value) pair). This can be useful for algorithms that use a |
| 814 | dictionary as a bag of "to do" items and repeatedly need to pick one |
| 815 | item. Such algorithms normally end up running in quadratic time; |
| 816 | using popitem() they can usually be made to run in linear time. |
| 817 | |
Tim Peters | 36cdad1 | 2000-12-29 02:06:45 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 818 | Standard library |
| 819 | |
Thomas Wouters | fe38525 | 2001-01-19 23:16:56 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 820 | - In the time module, the time argument to the functions strftime, |
| 821 | localtime, gmtime, asctime and ctime is now optional, defaulting to |
| 822 | the current time (in the local timezone). |
| 823 | |
Guido van Rossum | da91f22 | 2001-01-15 16:36:08 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 824 | - The ftplib module now defaults to passive mode, which is deemed a |
| 825 | more useful default given that clients are often inside firewalls |
| 826 | these days. Note that this could break if ftplib is used to connect |
| 827 | to a *server* that is inside a firewall, from outside; this is |
| 828 | expected to be a very rare situation. To fix that, you can call |
| 829 | ftp.set_pasv(0). |
| 830 | |
Martin v. Löwis | 10a2787 | 2001-01-13 09:54:41 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 831 | - The module site now treats .pth files not only for path configuration, |
| 832 | but also supports extensions to the initialization code: Lines starting |
| 833 | with import are executed. |
| 834 | |
Guido van Rossum | f61f166 | 2001-01-10 20:13:55 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 835 | - There's a new module, warnings, which implements a mechanism for |
| 836 | issuing and filtering warnings. There are some new built-in |
| 837 | exceptions that serve as warning categories, and a new command line |
| 838 | option, -W, to control warnings (e.g. -Wi ignores all warnings, -We |
| 839 | turns warnings into errors). warnings.warn(message[, category]) |
| 840 | issues a warning message; this can also be called from C as |
| 841 | PyErr_Warn(category, message). |
| 842 | |
| 843 | - A new module xreadlines was added. This exports a single factory |
| 844 | function, xreadlines(). The intention is that this code is the |
| 845 | absolutely fastest way to iterate over all lines in an open |
| 846 | file(-like) object: |
| 847 | |
| 848 | import xreadlines |
| 849 | for line in xreadlines.xreadlines(file): |
| 850 | ...do something to line... |
| 851 | |
| 852 | This is equivalent to the previous the speed record holder using |
| 853 | file.readlines(sizehint). Note that if file is a real file object |
| 854 | (as opposed to a file-like object), this is equivalent: |
| 855 | |
| 856 | for line in file.xreadlines(): |
| 857 | ...do something to line... |
| 858 | |
Tim Peters | 36cdad1 | 2000-12-29 02:06:45 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 859 | - The bisect module has new functions bisect_left, insort_left, |
| 860 | bisect_right and insort_right. The old names bisect and insort |
| 861 | are now aliases for bisect_right and insort_right. XXX_right |
| 862 | and XXX_left methods differ in what happens when the new element |
| 863 | compares equal to one or more elements already in the list: the |
| 864 | 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] | 865 | right. Code that doesn't care where equal elements end up should |
| 866 | continue to use the old, short names ("bisect" and "insort"). |
Tim Peters | 36cdad1 | 2000-12-29 02:06:45 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 867 | |
Andrew M. Kuchling | f6f3a89 | 2001-01-13 14:53:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 868 | - The new curses.panel module wraps the panel library that forms part |
| 869 | of SYSV curses and ncurses. Contributed by Thomas Gellekum. |
| 870 | |
Guido van Rossum | f61f166 | 2001-01-10 20:13:55 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 871 | - The SocketServer module now sets the allow_reuse_address flag by |
| 872 | default in the TCPServer class. |
| 873 | |
| 874 | - A new function, sys._getframe(), returns the stack frame pointer of |
| 875 | the caller. This is intended only as a building block for |
| 876 | higher-level mechanisms such as string interpolation. |
| 877 | |
Martin v. Löwis | 2a5130e | 2001-02-27 04:21:58 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 878 | - The pyexpat module supports a number of new handlers, which are |
| 879 | available only in expat 1.2. If invocation of a callback fails, it |
| 880 | will report an additional frame in the traceback. Parser objects |
| 881 | participate now in garbage collection. If expat reports an unknown |
| 882 | encoding, pyexpat will try to use a Python codec; that works only |
| 883 | for single-byte charsets. The parser type objects is exposed as |
| 884 | XMLParserObject. |
| 885 | |
| 886 | - xml.dom now offers standard definitions for symbolic node type and |
| 887 | exception code constants, and a hierarchy of DOM exceptions. minidom |
| 888 | was adjusted to use them. |
| 889 | |
| 890 | - The conformance of xml.dom.minidom to the DOM specification was |
| 891 | improved. It detects a number of additional error cases; the |
| 892 | previous/next relationship works even when the tree is modified; |
| 893 | Node supports the normalize() method; NamedNodeMap, DocumentType and |
| 894 | DOMImplementation classes were added; Element supports the |
| 895 | hasAttribute and hasAttributeNS methods; and Text supports the splitText |
| 896 | method. |
| 897 | |
Guido van Rossum | f61f166 | 2001-01-10 20:13:55 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 898 | Build issues |
| 899 | |
Guido van Rossum | 1e33bdc | 2001-01-23 03:17:00 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 900 | - For Unix (and Unix-compatible) builds, configuration and building of |
| 901 | extension modules is now greatly automated. Rather than having to |
| 902 | edit the Modules/Setup file to indicate which modules should be |
| 903 | built and where their include files and libraries are, a |
| 904 | distutils-based setup.py script now takes care of building most |
| 905 | extension modules. All extension modules built this way are built |
| 906 | as shared libraries. Only a few modules that must be linked |
| 907 | statically are still listed in the Setup file; you won't need to |
| 908 | edit their configuration. |
| 909 | |
| 910 | - Python should now build out of the box on Cygwin. If it doesn't, |
| 911 | mail to Jason Tishler (jlt63 at users.sourceforge.net). |
Guido van Rossum | f61f166 | 2001-01-10 20:13:55 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 912 | |
| 913 | - Python now always uses its own (renamed) implementation of getopt() |
| 914 | -- there's too much variation among C library getopt() |
| 915 | implementations. |
| 916 | |
| 917 | - C++ compilers are better supported; the CXX macro is always set to a |
| 918 | C++ compiler if one is found. |
Tim Peters | 36cdad1 | 2000-12-29 02:06:45 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 919 | |
Tim Peters | d92dfe0 | 2000-12-12 01:18:41 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 920 | Windows changes |
| 921 | |
| 922 | - select module: By default under Windows, a select() call |
| 923 | can specify no more than 64 sockets. Python now boosts |
| 924 | this Microsoft default to 512. If you need even more than |
| 925 | that, see the MS docs (you'll need to #define FD_SETSIZE |
| 926 | and recompile Python from source). |
| 927 | |
Guido van Rossum | f61f166 | 2001-01-10 20:13:55 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 928 | - Support for Windows 3.1, DOS and OS/2 is gone. The Lib/dos-8x3 |
| 929 | subdirectory is no more! |
| 930 | |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 931 | |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 932 | What's New in Python 2.0? |
Fred Drake | 1a64050 | 2000-10-16 20:27:25 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 933 | ========================= |
Guido van Rossum | 6100033 | 1997-08-15 04:39:58 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 934 | |
Guido van Rossum | 8ed602b | 2000-09-01 22:34:33 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 935 | 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] | 936 | changes are in the file HISTORY. If you are making the jump directly |
| 937 | from Python 1.5.2 to 2.0, make sure to read the section for 1.6 in the |
| 938 | HISTORY file! Many important changes listed there. |
Guido van Rossum | 6100033 | 1997-08-15 04:39:58 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 939 | |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 940 | Alternatively, a good overview of the changes between 1.5.2 and 2.0 is |
| 941 | the document "What's New in Python 2.0" by Kuchling and Moshe Zadka: |
| 942 | http://starship.python.net/crew/amk/python/writing/new-python/. |
Guido van Rossum | 1f83cce | 1997-10-06 21:04:35 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 943 | |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 944 | --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.pythonlabs.com/~guido/) |
Guido van Rossum | 437cfe8 | 1999-04-08 20:17:57 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 945 | |
| 946 | ====================================================================== |
| 947 | |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 948 | What's new in 2.0 (since release candidate 1)? |
| 949 | ============================================== |
| 950 | |
| 951 | Standard library |
| 952 | |
| 953 | - The copy_reg module was modified to clarify its intended use: to |
| 954 | register pickle support for extension types, not for classes. |
| 955 | pickle() will raise a TypeError if it is passed a class. |
| 956 | |
| 957 | - Fixed a bug in gettext's "normalize and expand" code that prevented |
| 958 | it from finding an existing .mo file. |
| 959 | |
| 960 | - Restored support for HTTP/0.9 servers in httplib. |
| 961 | |
Tim Peters | 989b7b9 | 2000-10-16 20:24:53 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 962 | - The math module was changed to stop raising OverflowError in case of |
| 963 | underflow, and return 0 instead in underflow cases. Whether Python |
| 964 | used to raise OverflowError in case of underflow was platform- |
| 965 | dependent (it did when the platform math library set errno to ERANGE |
| 966 | on underflow). |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 967 | |
| 968 | - Fixed a bug in StringIO that occurred when the file position was not |
| 969 | at the end of the file and write() was called with enough data to |
| 970 | extend past the end of the file. |
| 971 | |
| 972 | - Fixed a bug that caused Tkinter error messages to get lost on |
| 973 | Windows. The bug was fixed by replacing direct use of |
| 974 | interp->result with Tcl_GetStringResult(interp). |
| 975 | |
| 976 | - Fixed bug in urllib2 that caused it to fail when it received an HTTP |
| 977 | redirect response. |
| 978 | |
| 979 | - Several changes were made to distutils: Some debugging code was |
| 980 | removed from util. Fixed the installer used when an external zip |
| 981 | program (like WinZip) is not found; the source code for this |
| 982 | installer is in Misc/distutils. check_lib() was modified to behave |
| 983 | more like AC_CHECK_LIB by add other_libraries() as a parameter. The |
| 984 | test for whether installed modules are on sys.path was changed to |
| 985 | use both normcase() and normpath(). |
| 986 | |
Jeremy Hylton | d867a2c | 2000-10-16 20:41:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 987 | - Several minor bugs were fixed in the xml package (the minidom, |
| 988 | pulldom, expatreader, and saxutils modules). |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 989 | |
| 990 | - The regression test driver (regrtest.py) behavior when invoked with |
| 991 | -l changed: It now reports a count of objects that are recognized as |
| 992 | garbage but not freed by the garbage collector. |
| 993 | |
Tim Peters | 989b7b9 | 2000-10-16 20:24:53 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 994 | - The regression test for the math module was changed to test |
| 995 | exceptional behavior when the test is run in verbose mode. Python |
| 996 | cannot yet guarantee consistent exception behavior across platforms, |
| 997 | so the exception part of test_math is run only in verbose mode, and |
| 998 | may fail on your platform. |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 999 | |
| 1000 | Internals |
| 1001 | |
| 1002 | - PyOS_CheckStack() has been disabled on Win64, where it caused |
| 1003 | test_sre to fail. |
| 1004 | |
| 1005 | Build issues |
| 1006 | |
| 1007 | - Changed compiler flags, so that gcc is always invoked with -Wall and |
| 1008 | -Wstrict-prototypes. Users compiling Python with GCC should see |
| 1009 | exactly one warning, except if they have passed configure the |
Tim Peters | 989b7b9 | 2000-10-16 20:24:53 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1010 | --with-pydebug flag. The expected warning is for getopt() in |
Tim Peters | adfb94f | 2000-10-16 20:51:33 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1011 | Modules/main.c. This warning will be fixed for Python 2.1. |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1012 | |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1013 | - Fixed configure to add -threads argument during linking on OSF1. |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1014 | |
| 1015 | Tools and other miscellany |
| 1016 | |
| 1017 | - The compiler in Tools/compiler was updated to support the new |
| 1018 | language features introduced in 2.0: extended print statement, list |
| 1019 | comprehensions, and augmented assignments. The new compiler should |
| 1020 | also be backwards compatible with Python 1.5.2; the compiler will |
| 1021 | always generate code for the version of the interpreter it runs |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1022 | under. |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1023 | |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1024 | What's new in 2.0 release candidate 1 (since beta 2)? |
| 1025 | ===================================================== |
| 1026 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 6040aaa | 2000-10-09 21:27:22 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1027 | What is release candidate 1? |
| 1028 | |
| 1029 | We believe that release candidate 1 will fix all known bugs that we |
| 1030 | intend to fix for the 2.0 final release. This release should be a bit |
| 1031 | more stable than the previous betas. We would like to see even more |
| 1032 | widespread testing before the final release, so we are producing this |
| 1033 | release candidate. The final release will be exactly the same unless |
| 1034 | any show-stopping (or brown bag) bugs are found by testers of the |
| 1035 | release candidate. |
| 1036 | |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1037 | 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] | 1038 | to support building Python for specific platforms. |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1039 | |
| 1040 | Core language, builtins, and interpreter |
| 1041 | |
| 1042 | - A bug that caused crashes when __coerce__ was used with augmented |
| 1043 | assignment, e.g. +=, was fixed. |
| 1044 | |
| 1045 | - Raise ZeroDivisionError when raising zero to a negative number, |
| 1046 | e.g. 0.0 ** -2.0. Note that math.pow is unrelated to the builtin |
| 1047 | power operator and the result of math.pow(0.0, -2.0) will vary by |
| 1048 | platform. On Linux, it raises a ValueError. |
| 1049 | |
| 1050 | - A bug in Unicode string interpolation was fixed that occasionally |
| 1051 | caused errors with formats including "%%". For example, the |
| 1052 | following expression "%% %s" % u"abc" no longer raises a TypeError. |
| 1053 | |
| 1054 | - Compilation of deeply nested expressions raises MemoryError instead |
| 1055 | of SyntaxError, e.g. eval("[" * 50 + "]" * 50). |
| 1056 | |
| 1057 | - In 2.0b2 on Windows, the interpreter wrote .pyc files in text mode, |
| 1058 | rendering them useless. They are now written in binary mode again. |
| 1059 | |
| 1060 | Standard library |
| 1061 | |
| 1062 | - Keyword arguments are now accepted for most pattern and match object |
| 1063 | methods in SRE, the standard regular expression engine. |
| 1064 | |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1065 | - In SRE, fixed error with negative lookahead and lookbehind that |
Jeremy Hylton | 32e20ff | 2000-10-09 19:48:11 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1066 | manifested itself as a runtime error in patterns like "(?<!abc)(def)". |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1067 | |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1068 | - Several bugs in the Unicode handling and error handling in _tkinter |
| 1069 | were fixed. |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1070 | |
| 1071 | - Fix memory management errors in Merge() and Tkapp_Call() routines. |
| 1072 | |
| 1073 | - Several changes were made to cStringIO to make it compatible with |
| 1074 | the file-like object interface and with StringIO. If operations are |
| 1075 | performed on a closed object, an exception is raised. The truncate |
| 1076 | method now accepts a position argument and readline accepts a size |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1077 | argument. |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1078 | |
| 1079 | - There were many changes made to the linuxaudiodev module and its |
| 1080 | test suite; as a result, a short, unexpected audio sample should now |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1081 | play when the regression test is run. |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1082 | |
| 1083 | Note that this module is named poorly, because it should work |
| 1084 | correctly on any platform that supports the Open Sound System |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1085 | (OSS). |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1086 | |
| 1087 | The module now raises exceptions when errors occur instead of |
| 1088 | crashing. It also defines the AFMT_A_LAW format (logarithmic A-law |
| 1089 | audio) and defines a getptr() method that calls the |
| 1090 | SNDCTL_DSP_GETxPTR ioctl defined in the OSS Programmer's Guide. |
| 1091 | |
| 1092 | - The library_version attribute, introduced in an earlier beta, was |
| 1093 | removed because it can not be supported with early versions of the C |
| 1094 | readline library, which provides no way to determine the version at |
| 1095 | compile-time. |
| 1096 | |
| 1097 | - The binascii module is now enabled on Win64. |
| 1098 | |
Tim Peters | 46446d6 | 2000-10-09 21:19:31 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1099 | - tokenize.py no longer suffers "recursion depth" errors when parsing |
| 1100 | programs with very long string literals. |
| 1101 | |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1102 | Internals |
| 1103 | |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1104 | - Fixed several buffer overflow vulnerabilities in calculate_path(), |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1105 | which is called when the interpreter starts up to determine where |
| 1106 | the standard library is installed. These vulnerabilities affect all |
| 1107 | previous versions of Python and can be exploited by setting very |
| 1108 | long values for PYTHONHOME or argv[0]. The risk is greatest for a |
| 1109 | setuid Python script, although use of the wrapper in |
| 1110 | Misc/setuid-prog.c will eliminate the vulnerability. |
| 1111 | |
| 1112 | - Fixed garbage collection bugs in instance creation that were |
| 1113 | triggered when errors occurred during initialization. The solution, |
| 1114 | applied in cPickle and in PyInstance_New(), is to call |
| 1115 | PyObject_GC_Init() after the initialization of the object's |
| 1116 | container attributes is complete. |
| 1117 | |
| 1118 | - pyexpat adds definitions of PyModule_AddStringConstant and |
| 1119 | PyModule_AddObject if the Python version is less than 2.0, which |
| 1120 | provides compatibility with PyXML on Python 1.5.2. |
| 1121 | |
| 1122 | - If the platform has a bogus definition for LONG_BIT (the number of |
| 1123 | bits in a long), an error will be reported at compile time. |
| 1124 | |
| 1125 | - Fix bugs in _PyTuple_Resize() which caused hard-to-interpret garbage |
| 1126 | collection crashes and possibly other, unreported crashes. |
| 1127 | |
| 1128 | - Fixed a memory leak in _PyUnicode_Fini(). |
| 1129 | |
| 1130 | Build issues |
| 1131 | |
| 1132 | - configure now accepts a --with-suffix option that specifies the |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1133 | executable suffix. This is useful for builds on Cygwin and Mac OS |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1134 | X, for example. |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1135 | |
| 1136 | - The mmap.PAGESIZE constant is now initialized using sysconf when |
| 1137 | possible, which eliminates a dependency on -lucb for Reliant UNIX. |
| 1138 | |
| 1139 | - The md5 file should now compile on all platforms. |
| 1140 | |
| 1141 | - The select module now compiles on platforms that do not define |
| 1142 | POLLRDNORM and related constants. |
| 1143 | |
| 1144 | - Darwin (Mac OS X): Initial support for static builds on this |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1145 | platform. |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1146 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 1092120 | 2000-10-09 18:34:12 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1147 | - BeOS: A number of changes were made to the build and installation |
| 1148 | process. ar-fake now operates on a directory of object files. |
| 1149 | dl_export.h is gone, and its macros now appear on the mwcc command |
| 1150 | line during build on PPC BeOS. |
| 1151 | |
Jeremy Hylton | d6e2023 | 2000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1152 | - Platform directory in lib/python2.0 is "plat-beos5" (or |
Jeremy Hylton | 1092120 | 2000-10-09 18:34:12 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1153 | "plat-beos4", if building on BeOS 4.5), rather than "plat-beos". |
Jeremy Hylton | ed9e644 | 2000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1154 | |
| 1155 | - Cygwin: Support for shared libraries, Tkinter, and sockets. |
| 1156 | |
| 1157 | - SunOS 4.1.4_JL: Fix test for directory existence in configure. |
| 1158 | |
| 1159 | Tools and other miscellany |
| 1160 | |
| 1161 | - Removed debugging prints from main used with freeze. |
| 1162 | |
Tim Peters | 46446d6 | 2000-10-09 21:19:31 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1163 | - IDLE auto-indent no longer crashes when it encounters Unicode |
| 1164 | characters. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1165 | |
| 1166 | What's new in 2.0 beta 2 (since beta 1)? |
| 1167 | ======================================== |
| 1168 | |
| 1169 | Core language, builtins, and interpreter |
| 1170 | |
Tim Peters | 482c021 | 2000-09-26 06:33:09 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1171 | - 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] | 1172 | "%d" % 2L**64 == "18446744073709551616". |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1173 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1174 | - Add -h and -V command line options to print the usage message and |
| 1175 | Python version number and exit immediately. |
| 1176 | |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1177 | - eval() and exec accept Unicode objects as code parameters. |
| 1178 | |
| 1179 | - getattr() and setattr() now also accept Unicode objects for the |
| 1180 | attribute name, which are converted to strings using the default |
| 1181 | encoding before lookup. |
| 1182 | |
| 1183 | - Multiplication on string and Unicode now does proper bounds |
| 1184 | checking; e.g. 'a' * 65536 * 65536 will raise ValueError, "repeated |
| 1185 | string is too long." |
| 1186 | |
| 1187 | - Better error message when continue is found in try statement in a |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1188 | loop. |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1189 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1190 | |
| 1191 | Standard library and extensions |
| 1192 | |
Guido van Rossum | 5b08f13 | 2001-04-16 02:05:23 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1193 | - socket module: the OpenSSL code now adds support for RAND_status() |
| 1194 | and EGD (Entropy Gathering Device). |
| 1195 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1196 | - array: reverse() method of array now works. buffer_info() now does |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1197 | argument checking; it still takes no arguments. |
| 1198 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1199 | - asyncore/asynchat: Included most recent version from Sam Rushing. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1200 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1201 | - cgi: Accept '&' or ';' as separator characters when parsing form data. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1202 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1203 | - CGIHTTPServer: Now works on Windows (and perhaps even Mac). |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1204 | |
| 1205 | - ConfigParser: When reading the file, options spelled in upper case |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1206 | letters are now correctly converted to lowercase. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1207 | |
| 1208 | - copy: Copy Unicode objects atomically. |
| 1209 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1210 | - cPickle: Fail gracefully when copy_reg can't be imported. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1211 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1212 | - cStringIO: Implemented readlines() method. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1213 | |
Fred Drake | 67233bc | 2000-09-26 16:40:27 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1214 | - dbm: Add get() and setdefault() methods to dbm object. Add constant |
| 1215 | `library' to module that names the library used. Added doc strings |
| 1216 | and method names to error messages. Uses configure to determine |
| 1217 | which ndbm.h file to include; Berkeley DB's nbdm and GDBM's ndbm is |
| 1218 | now available options. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1219 | |
| 1220 | - distutils: Update to version 0.9.3. |
| 1221 | |
| 1222 | - dl: Add several dl.RTLD_ constants. |
| 1223 | |
| 1224 | - fpectl: Now supported on FreeBSD. |
| 1225 | |
| 1226 | - gc: Add DEBUG_SAVEALL option. When enabled all garbage objects |
| 1227 | found by the collector will be saved in gc.garbage. This is useful |
| 1228 | for debugging a program that creates reference cycles. |
| 1229 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1230 | - httplib: Three changes: Restore support for set_debuglevel feature |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1231 | of HTTP class. Do not close socket on zero-length response. Do not |
| 1232 | crash when server sends invalid content-length header. |
| 1233 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1234 | - mailbox: Mailbox class conforms better to qmail specifications. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1235 | |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1236 | - marshal: When reading a short, sign-extend on platforms where shorts |
| 1237 | are bigger than 16 bits. When reading a long, repair the unportable |
| 1238 | sign extension that was being done for 64-bit machines. (It assumed |
| 1239 | that signed right shift sign-extends.) |
| 1240 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1241 | - operator: Add contains(), invert(), __invert__() as aliases for |
| 1242 | __contains__(), inv(), and __inv__() respectively. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1243 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1244 | - os: Add support for popen2() and popen3() on all platforms where |
| 1245 | fork() exists. (popen4() is still in the works.) |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1246 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1247 | - os: (Windows only:) Add startfile() function that acts like double- |
Tim Peters | 482c021 | 2000-09-26 06:33:09 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1248 | clicking on a file in Explorer (or passing the file name to the |
| 1249 | DOS "start" command). |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1250 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1251 | - os.path: (Windows, DOS:) Treat trailing colon correctly in |
Tim Peters | 482c021 | 2000-09-26 06:33:09 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1252 | os.path.join. os.path.join("a:", "b") yields "a:b". |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1253 | |
| 1254 | - pickle: Now raises ValueError when an invalid pickle that contains |
| 1255 | a non-string repr where a string repr was expected. This behavior |
| 1256 | matches cPickle. |
| 1257 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1258 | - posixfile: Remove broken __del__() method. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1259 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1260 | - py_compile: support CR+LF line terminators in source file. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1261 | |
| 1262 | - readline: Does not immediately exit when ^C is hit when readline and |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1263 | threads are configured. Adds definition of rl_library_version. (The |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1264 | latter addition requires GNU readline 2.2 or later.) |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1265 | |
| 1266 | - rfc822: Domain literals returned by AddrlistClass method |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1267 | getdomainliteral() are now properly wrapped in brackets. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1268 | |
| 1269 | - site: sys.setdefaultencoding() should only be called in case the |
Tim Peters | 482c021 | 2000-09-26 06:33:09 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1270 | standard default encoding ("ascii") is changed. This saves quite a |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1271 | few cycles during startup since the first call to |
| 1272 | setdefaultencoding() will initialize the codec registry and the |
| 1273 | encodings package. |
| 1274 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1275 | - socket: Support for size hint in readlines() method of object returned |
| 1276 | by makefile(). |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1277 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1278 | - sre: Added experimental expand() method to match objects. Does not |
Jeremy Hylton | 625915e | 2000-10-02 13:43:33 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1279 | use buffer interface on Unicode strings. Does not hang if group id |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1280 | is followed by whitespace. |
| 1281 | |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1282 | - StringIO: Size hint in readlines() is now supported as documented. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1283 | |
| 1284 | - struct: Check ranges for bytes and shorts. |
| 1285 | |
| 1286 | - urllib: Improved handling of win32 proxy settings. Fixed quote and |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1287 | quote_plus functions so that the always encode a comma. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1288 | |
| 1289 | - Tkinter: Image objects are now guaranteed to have unique ids. Set |
| 1290 | event.delta to zero if Tk version doesn't support mousewheel. |
| 1291 | Removed some debugging prints. |
| 1292 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1293 | - UserList: now implements __contains__(). |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1294 | |
Fred Drake | 67233bc | 2000-09-26 16:40:27 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1295 | - webbrowser: On Windows, use os.startfile() instead of os.popen(), |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1296 | which works around a bug in Norton AntiVirus 2000 that leads directly |
| 1297 | to a Blue Screen freeze. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1298 | |
| 1299 | - xml: New version detection code allows PyXML to override standard |
| 1300 | XML package if PyXML version is greater than 0.6.1. |
| 1301 | |
Fred Drake | 64bb380 | 2000-09-26 16:21:35 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1302 | - xml.dom: DOM level 1 support for basic XML. Includes xml.dom.minidom |
| 1303 | (conventional DOM), and xml.dom.pulldom, which allows building the DOM |
| 1304 | tree only for nodes which are sufficiently interesting to a specific |
| 1305 | application. Does not provide the HTML-specific extensions. Still |
| 1306 | undocumented. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1307 | |
Fred Drake | 64bb380 | 2000-09-26 16:21:35 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1308 | - xml.sax: SAX 2 support for Python, including all the handler |
| 1309 | interfaces needed to process XML 1.0 compliant XML. Some |
| 1310 | documentation is already available. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1311 | |
Fred Drake | 64bb380 | 2000-09-26 16:21:35 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1312 | - pyexpat: Renamed to xml.parsers.expat since this is part of the new, |
| 1313 | packagized XML support. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1314 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1315 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1316 | C API |
| 1317 | |
| 1318 | - Add three new convenience functions for module initialization -- |
| 1319 | PyModule_AddObject(), PyModule_AddIntConstant(), and |
| 1320 | PyModule_AddStringConstant(). |
| 1321 | |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1322 | - Cleaned up definition of NULL in C source code; all definitions were |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1323 | removed and add #error to Python.h if NULL isn't defined after |
| 1324 | #include of stdio.h. |
| 1325 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1326 | - 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] | 1327 | backwards compatibility (at the source level) with old extensions. |
| 1328 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1329 | - A wrapper API was added for signal() and sigaction(). Instead of |
| 1330 | either function, always use PyOS_getsig() to get a signal handler |
| 1331 | and PyOS_setsig() to set one. A new convenience typedef |
| 1332 | PyOS_sighandler_t is defined for the type of signal handlers. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1333 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1334 | - Add PyString_AsStringAndSize() function that provides access to the |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1335 | internal data buffer and size of a string object -- or the default |
| 1336 | encoded version of a Unicode object. |
| 1337 | |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1338 | - PyString_Size() and PyString_AsString() accept Unicode objects. |
| 1339 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1340 | - 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] | 1341 | exists). INT_MAX and LONG_MAX will always be defined, even if |
| 1342 | <limits.h> is not available. |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1343 | |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1344 | - PyFloat_FromString takes a second argument, pend, that was |
| 1345 | effectively useless. It is now officially useless but preserved for |
| 1346 | backwards compatibility. If the pend argument is not NULL, *pend is |
| 1347 | set to NULL. |
| 1348 | |
| 1349 | - PyObject_GetAttr() and PyObject_SetAttr() now accept Unicode objects |
| 1350 | for the attribute name. See note on getattr() above. |
| 1351 | |
| 1352 | - A few bug fixes to argument processing for Unicode. |
| 1353 | PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() now accepts "es#" and "es". |
| 1354 | PyArg_Parse() special cases "s#" for Unicode objects; it returns a |
| 1355 | pointer to the default encoded string data instead of to the raw |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1356 | UTF-16. |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1357 | |
| 1358 | - Py_BuildValue accepts B format (for bgen-generated code). |
| 1359 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1360 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1361 | Internals |
| 1362 | |
| 1363 | - On Unix, fix code for finding Python installation directory so that |
| 1364 | it works when argv[0] is a relative path. |
| 1365 | |
Andrew M. Kuchling | a1099be | 2000-12-15 01:16:43 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1366 | - Added a true unicode_internal_encode() function and fixed the |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1367 | unicode_internal_decode function() to support Unicode objects directly |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1368 | rather than by generating a copy of the object. |
| 1369 | |
Tim Peters | 482c021 | 2000-09-26 06:33:09 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1370 | - Several of the internal Unicode tables are much smaller now, and |
| 1371 | the source code should be much friendlier to weaker compilers. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1372 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 97693b0 | 2000-09-26 17:42:51 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1373 | - In the garbage collector: Fixed bug in collection of tuples. Fixed |
| 1374 | bug that caused some instances to be removed from the container set |
| 1375 | while they were still live. Fixed parsing in gc.set_debug() for |
| 1376 | platforms where sizeof(long) > sizeof(int). |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1377 | |
| 1378 | - Fixed refcount problem in instance deallocation that only occurred |
| 1379 | when Py_REF_DEBUG was defined and Py_TRACE_REFS was not. |
| 1380 | |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1381 | - On Windows, getpythonregpath is now protected against null data in |
| 1382 | registry key. |
| 1383 | |
| 1384 | - 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] | 1385 | condition. |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1386 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1387 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1388 | Build and platform-specific issues |
| 1389 | |
| 1390 | - Better support of GNU Pth via --with-pth configure option. |
| 1391 | |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1392 | - Python/C API now properly exposed to dynamically-loaded extension |
| 1393 | modules on Reliant UNIX. |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1394 | |
| 1395 | - Changes for the benefit of SunOS 4.1.4 (really!). mmapmodule.c: |
| 1396 | Don't define MS_SYNC to be zero when it is undefined. Added missing |
| 1397 | prototypes in posixmodule.c. |
| 1398 | |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1399 | - Improved support for HP-UX build. Threads should now be correctly |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1400 | configured (on HP-UX 10.20 and 11.00). |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1401 | |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1402 | - Fix largefile support on older NetBSD systems and OpenBSD by adding |
| 1403 | define for TELL64. |
| 1404 | |
| 1405 | |
| 1406 | Tools and other miscellany |
| 1407 | |
| 1408 | - ftpmirror: Call to main() is wrapped in if __name__ == "__main__". |
| 1409 | |
| 1410 | - freeze: The modulefinder now works with 2.0 opcodes. |
| 1411 | |
Tim Peters | a3a3a03 | 2000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1412 | - IDLE: |
Jeremy Hylton | fa2e2c1 | 2000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1413 | Move hackery of sys.argv until after the Tk instance has been |
| 1414 | created, which allows the application-specific Tkinter |
| 1415 | initialization to be executed if present; also pass an explicit |
| 1416 | className parameter to the Tk() constructor. |
Fred Drake | 64bb380 | 2000-09-26 16:21:35 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1417 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 1b61859 | 2000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1418 | |
| 1419 | What's new in 2.0 beta 1? |
| 1420 | ========================= |
| 1421 | |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1422 | Source Incompatibilities |
| 1423 | ------------------------ |
| 1424 | |
| 1425 | None. Note that 1.6 introduced several incompatibilities with 1.5.2, |
| 1426 | such as single-argument append(), connect() and bind(), and changes to |
| 1427 | str(long) and repr(float). |
| 1428 | |
| 1429 | |
| 1430 | Binary Incompatibilities |
| 1431 | ------------------------ |
| 1432 | |
| 1433 | - Third party extensions built for Python 1.5.x or 1.6 cannot be used |
| 1434 | with Python 2.0; these extensions will have to be rebuilt for Python |
| 1435 | 2.0. |
| 1436 | |
| 1437 | - On Windows, attempting to import a third party extension built for |
| 1438 | Python 1.5.x or 1.6 results in an immediate crash; there's not much we |
| 1439 | can do about this. Check your PYTHONPATH environment variable! |
| 1440 | |
| 1441 | - Python bytecode files (*.pyc and *.pyo) are not compatible between |
| 1442 | releases. |
| 1443 | |
| 1444 | |
| 1445 | Overview of Changes Since 1.6 |
| 1446 | ----------------------------- |
| 1447 | |
| 1448 | There are many new modules (including brand new XML support through |
| 1449 | the xml package, and i18n support through the gettext module); a list |
| 1450 | of all new modules is included below. Lots of bugs have been fixed. |
| 1451 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1452 | The process for making major new changes to the language has changed |
| 1453 | since Python 1.6. Enhancements must now be documented by a Python |
| 1454 | Enhancement Proposal (PEP) before they can be accepted. |
| 1455 | |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1456 | There are several important syntax enhancements, described in more |
| 1457 | detail below: |
| 1458 | |
| 1459 | - Augmented assignment, e.g. x += 1 |
| 1460 | |
| 1461 | - List comprehensions, e.g. [x**2 for x in range(10)] |
| 1462 | |
| 1463 | - Extended import statement, e.g. import Module as Name |
| 1464 | |
| 1465 | - Extended print statement, e.g. print >> file, "Hello" |
| 1466 | |
| 1467 | Other important changes: |
| 1468 | |
| 1469 | - Optional collection of cyclical garbage |
| 1470 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1471 | Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) |
| 1472 | --------------------------------- |
| 1473 | |
| 1474 | PEP stands for Python Enhancement Proposal. A PEP is a design |
| 1475 | document providing information to the Python community, or describing |
| 1476 | a new feature for Python. The PEP should provide a concise technical |
| 1477 | specification of the feature and a rationale for the feature. |
| 1478 | |
| 1479 | We intend PEPs to be the primary mechanisms for proposing new |
| 1480 | features, for collecting community input on an issue, and for |
| 1481 | documenting the design decisions that have gone into Python. The PEP |
| 1482 | author is responsible for building consensus within the community and |
| 1483 | documenting dissenting opinions. |
| 1484 | |
| 1485 | The PEPs are available at http://python.sourceforge.net/peps/. |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1486 | |
| 1487 | Augmented Assignment |
| 1488 | -------------------- |
| 1489 | |
| 1490 | This must have been the most-requested feature of the past years! |
| 1491 | Eleven new assignment operators were added: |
| 1492 | |
Guido van Rossum | e905e95 | 2000-09-05 12:42:46 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1493 | += -= *= /= %= **= <<= >>= &= ^= |= |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1494 | |
| 1495 | For example, |
| 1496 | |
| 1497 | A += B |
| 1498 | |
| 1499 | is similar to |
| 1500 | |
| 1501 | A = A + B |
| 1502 | |
| 1503 | except that A is evaluated only once (relevant when A is something |
| 1504 | like dict[index].attr). |
| 1505 | |
| 1506 | However, if A is a mutable object, A may be modified in place. Thus, |
| 1507 | if A is a number or a string, A += B has the same effect as A = A+B |
| 1508 | (except A is only evaluated once); but if a is a list, A += B has the |
| 1509 | same effect as A.extend(B)! |
| 1510 | |
| 1511 | Classes and built-in object types can override the new operators in |
| 1512 | order to implement the in-place behavior; the not-in-place behavior is |
| 1513 | used automatically as a fallback when an object doesn't implement the |
| 1514 | in-place behavior. For classes, the method name is derived from the |
| 1515 | method name for the corresponding not-in-place operator by inserting |
| 1516 | an 'i' in front of the name, e.g. __iadd__ implements in-place |
| 1517 | __add__. |
| 1518 | |
| 1519 | Augmented assignment was implemented by Thomas Wouters. |
| 1520 | |
| 1521 | |
| 1522 | List Comprehensions |
| 1523 | ------------------- |
| 1524 | |
| 1525 | This is a flexible new notation for lists whose elements are computed |
| 1526 | from another list (or lists). The simplest form is: |
| 1527 | |
| 1528 | [<expression> for <variable> in <sequence>] |
| 1529 | |
Guido van Rossum | 56db095 | 2000-09-06 23:34:25 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1530 | 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] | 1531 | 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] | 1532 | |
| 1533 | You can also add a condition: |
| 1534 | |
| 1535 | [<expression> for <variable> in <sequence> if <condition>] |
| 1536 | |
| 1537 | For example, [w for w in words if w == w.lower()] would yield the list |
| 1538 | of words that contain no uppercase characters. This is more efficient |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1539 | 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] | 1540 | |
| 1541 | You can also have nested for loops and more than one 'if' clause. For |
| 1542 | example, here's a function that flattens a sequence of sequences:: |
| 1543 | |
| 1544 | def flatten(seq): |
| 1545 | return [x for subseq in seq for x in subseq] |
| 1546 | |
| 1547 | flatten([[0], [1,2,3], [4,5], [6,7,8,9], []]) |
| 1548 | |
| 1549 | This prints |
| 1550 | |
| 1551 | [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9] |
| 1552 | |
| 1553 | List comprehensions originated as a patch set from Greg Ewing; Skip |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1554 | Montanaro and Thomas Wouters also contributed. Described by PEP 202. |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1555 | |
| 1556 | |
| 1557 | Extended Import Statement |
| 1558 | ------------------------- |
| 1559 | |
| 1560 | Many people have asked for a way to import a module under a different |
| 1561 | name. This can be accomplished like this: |
| 1562 | |
| 1563 | import foo |
| 1564 | bar = foo |
| 1565 | del foo |
| 1566 | |
| 1567 | but this common idiom gets old quickly. A simple extension of the |
| 1568 | import statement now allows this to be written as follows: |
| 1569 | |
| 1570 | import foo as bar |
| 1571 | |
| 1572 | There's also a variant for 'from ... import': |
| 1573 | |
| 1574 | from foo import bar as spam |
| 1575 | |
| 1576 | This also works with packages; e.g. you can write this: |
| 1577 | |
| 1578 | import test.regrtest as regrtest |
| 1579 | |
| 1580 | Note that 'as' is not a new keyword -- it is recognized only in this |
| 1581 | context (this is only possible because the syntax for the import |
| 1582 | statement doesn't involve expressions). |
| 1583 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1584 | Implemented by Thomas Wouters. Described by PEP 221. |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1585 | |
| 1586 | |
| 1587 | Extended Print Statement |
| 1588 | ------------------------ |
| 1589 | |
| 1590 | Easily the most controversial new feature, this extension to the print |
| 1591 | statement adds an option to make the output go to a different file |
| 1592 | than the default sys.stdout. |
| 1593 | |
| 1594 | For example, to write an error message to sys.stderr, you can now |
| 1595 | write: |
| 1596 | |
| 1597 | print >> sys.stderr, "Error: bad dog!" |
| 1598 | |
| 1599 | As a special feature, if the expression used to indicate the file |
Fred Drake | 45888ff | 2000-09-29 17:09:11 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1600 | 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] | 1601 | |
| 1602 | print >> None, "Hello world" |
| 1603 | |
| 1604 | is equivalent to |
| 1605 | |
| 1606 | print "Hello world" |
| 1607 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1608 | Design and implementation by Barry Warsaw. Described by PEP 214. |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1609 | |
| 1610 | |
| 1611 | Optional Collection of Cyclical Garbage |
| 1612 | --------------------------------------- |
| 1613 | |
| 1614 | Python is now equipped with a garbage collector that can hunt down |
| 1615 | cyclical references between Python objects. It's no replacement for |
| 1616 | reference counting; in fact, it depends on the reference counts being |
| 1617 | correct, and decides that a set of objects belong to a cycle if all |
| 1618 | their reference counts can be accounted for from their references to |
| 1619 | each other. This devious scheme was first proposed by Eric Tiedemann, |
| 1620 | and brought to implementation by Neil Schemenauer. |
| 1621 | |
| 1622 | There's a module "gc" that lets you control some parameters of the |
| 1623 | garbage collection. There's also an option to the configure script |
| 1624 | that lets you enable or disable the garbage collection. In 2.0b1, |
| 1625 | it's on by default, so that we (hopefully) can collect decent user |
| 1626 | experience with this new feature. There are some questions about its |
Fred Drake | 9f11cf8 | 2000-09-29 17:54:40 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1627 | 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] | 1628 | off by default in the final 2.0 release. |
| 1629 | |
| 1630 | |
| 1631 | Smaller Changes |
| 1632 | --------------- |
| 1633 | |
| 1634 | A new function zip() was added. zip(seq1, seq2, ...) is equivalent to |
| 1635 | map(None, seq1, seq2, ...) when the sequences have the same length; |
| 1636 | i.e. zip([1,2,3], [10,20,30]) returns [(1,10), (2,20), (3,30)]. When |
| 1637 | the lists are not all the same length, the shortest list wins: |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1638 | 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] | 1639 | |
| 1640 | sys.version_info is a tuple (major, minor, micro, level, serial). |
| 1641 | |
| 1642 | Dictionaries have an odd new method, setdefault(key, default). |
| 1643 | dict.setdefault(key, default) returns dict[key] if it exists; if not, |
| 1644 | it sets dict[key] to default and returns that value. Thus: |
| 1645 | |
| 1646 | dict.setdefault(key, []).append(item) |
| 1647 | |
| 1648 | does the same work as this common idiom: |
| 1649 | |
| 1650 | if not dict.has_key(key): |
| 1651 | dict[key] = [] |
| 1652 | dict[key].append(item) |
| 1653 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1654 | There are two new variants of SyntaxError that are raised for |
| 1655 | indentation-related errors: IndentationError and TabError. |
| 1656 | |
| 1657 | Changed \x to consume exactly two hex digits; see PEP 223. Added \U |
| 1658 | escape that consumes exactly eight hex digits. |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1659 | |
| 1660 | The limits on the size of expressions and file in Python source code |
| 1661 | have been raised from 2**16 to 2**32. Previous versions of Python |
| 1662 | were limited because the maximum argument size the Python VM accepted |
| 1663 | was 2**16. This limited the size of object constructor expressions, |
| 1664 | e.g. [1,2,3] or {'a':1, 'b':2}, and the size of source files. This |
| 1665 | limit was raised thanks to a patch by Charles Waldman that effectively |
| 1666 | fixes the problem. It is now much more likely that you will be |
| 1667 | limited by available memory than by an arbitrary limit in Python. |
| 1668 | |
| 1669 | The interpreter's maximum recursion depth can be modified by Python |
| 1670 | programs using sys.getrecursionlimit and sys.setrecursionlimit. This |
| 1671 | limit is the maximum number of recursive calls that can be made by |
| 1672 | Python code. The limit exists to prevent infinite recursion from |
| 1673 | overflowing the C stack and causing a core dump. The default value is |
| 1674 | 1000. The maximum safe value for a particular platform can be found |
| 1675 | by running Misc/find_recursionlimit.py. |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1676 | |
| 1677 | New Modules and Packages |
| 1678 | ------------------------ |
| 1679 | |
| 1680 | atexit - for registering functions to be called when Python exits. |
| 1681 | |
| 1682 | imputil - Greg Stein's alternative API for writing custom import |
| 1683 | hooks. |
| 1684 | |
| 1685 | pyexpat - an interface to the Expat XML parser, contributed by Paul |
| 1686 | Prescod. |
| 1687 | |
| 1688 | xml - a new package with XML support code organized (so far) in three |
| 1689 | subpackages: xml.dom, xml.sax, and xml.parsers. Describing these |
| 1690 | would fill a volume. There's a special feature whereby a |
| 1691 | user-installed package named _xmlplus overrides the standard |
| 1692 | xmlpackage; this is intended to give the XML SIG a hook to distribute |
| 1693 | backwards-compatible updates to the standard xml package. |
| 1694 | |
| 1695 | webbrowser - a platform-independent API to launch a web browser. |
| 1696 | |
| 1697 | |
Guido van Rossum | e905e95 | 2000-09-05 12:42:46 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1698 | Changed Modules |
| 1699 | --------------- |
| 1700 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1701 | array -- new methods for array objects: count, extend, index, pop, and |
| 1702 | remove |
| 1703 | |
| 1704 | binascii -- new functions b2a_hex and a2b_hex that convert between |
| 1705 | binary data and its hex representation |
| 1706 | |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1707 | calendar -- Many new functions that support features including control |
| 1708 | over which day of the week is the first day, returning strings instead |
| 1709 | of printing them. Also new symbolic constants for days of week, |
| 1710 | e.g. MONDAY, ..., SUNDAY. |
| 1711 | |
| 1712 | cgi -- FieldStorage objects have a getvalue method that works like a |
| 1713 | dictionary's get method and returns the value attribute of the object. |
| 1714 | |
| 1715 | ConfigParser -- The parser object has new methods has_option, |
| 1716 | remove_section, remove_option, set, and write. They allow the module |
| 1717 | to be used for writing config files as well as reading them. |
| 1718 | |
| 1719 | ftplib -- ntransfercmd(), transfercmd(), and retrbinary() all now |
Guido van Rossum | e905e95 | 2000-09-05 12:42:46 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1720 | optionally support the RFC 959 REST command. |
| 1721 | |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1722 | gzip -- readline and readlines now accept optional size arguments |
Guido van Rossum | e905e95 | 2000-09-05 12:42:46 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1723 | |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1724 | httplib -- New interfaces and support for HTTP/1.1 by Greg Stein. See |
| 1725 | the module doc strings for details. |
Guido van Rossum | 830ca2a | 2000-09-05 15:34:16 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1726 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1727 | locale -- implement getdefaultlocale for Win32 and Macintosh |
| 1728 | |
| 1729 | marshal -- no longer dumps core when marshaling deeply nested or |
| 1730 | recursive data structures |
| 1731 | |
| 1732 | os -- new functions isatty, seteuid, setegid, setreuid, setregid |
| 1733 | |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1734 | os/popen2 -- popen2/popen3/popen4 support under Windows. popen2/popen3 |
| 1735 | support under Unix. |
| 1736 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1737 | os/pty -- support for openpty and forkpty |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1738 | |
| 1739 | os.path -- fix semantics of os.path.commonprefix |
| 1740 | |
| 1741 | smtplib -- support for sending very long messages |
| 1742 | |
| 1743 | socket -- new function getfqdn() |
| 1744 | |
| 1745 | readline -- new functions to read, write and truncate history files. |
| 1746 | The readline section of the library reference manual contains an |
| 1747 | example. |
| 1748 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1749 | select -- add interface to poll system call |
| 1750 | |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1751 | shutil -- new copyfileobj function |
| 1752 | |
| 1753 | SimpleHTTPServer, CGIHTTPServer -- Fix problems with buffering in the |
| 1754 | HTTP server. |
| 1755 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1756 | Tkinter -- optimization of function flatten |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1757 | |
| 1758 | urllib -- scans environment variables for proxy configuration, |
Tim Peters | 8b09233 | 2000-09-05 20:15:25 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1759 | e.g. http_proxy. |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1760 | |
| 1761 | whichdb -- recognizes dumbdbm format |
Guido van Rossum | e905e95 | 2000-09-05 12:42:46 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1762 | |
| 1763 | |
| 1764 | Obsolete Modules |
| 1765 | ---------------- |
| 1766 | |
| 1767 | None. However note that 1.6 made a whole slew of modules obsolete: |
| 1768 | stdwin, soundex, cml, cmpcache, dircache, dump, find, grep, packmail, |
| 1769 | poly, zmod, strop, util, whatsound. |
| 1770 | |
| 1771 | |
| 1772 | Changed, New, Obsolete Tools |
| 1773 | ---------------------------- |
| 1774 | |
Tim Peters | 8b09233 | 2000-09-05 20:15:25 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1775 | None. |
Guido van Rossum | e905e95 | 2000-09-05 12:42:46 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1776 | |
| 1777 | |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1778 | C-level Changes |
| 1779 | --------------- |
| 1780 | |
| 1781 | Several cleanup jobs were carried out throughout the source code. |
| 1782 | |
| 1783 | All C code was converted to ANSI C; we got rid of all uses of the |
| 1784 | Py_PROTO() macro, which makes the header files a lot more readable. |
| 1785 | |
| 1786 | Most of the portability hacks were moved to a new header file, |
| 1787 | pyport.h; several other new header files were added and some old |
| 1788 | header files were removed, in an attempt to create a more rational set |
| 1789 | of header files. (Few of these ever need to be included explicitly; |
| 1790 | they are all included by Python.h.) |
| 1791 | |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1792 | Trent Mick ensured portability to 64-bit platforms, under both Linux |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1793 | and Win64, especially for the new Intel Itanium processor. Mick also |
| 1794 | added large file support for Linux64 and Win64. |
Guido van Rossum | f2ffce0 | 2000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1795 | |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1796 | The C APIs to return an object's size have been update to consistently |
| 1797 | use the form PyXXX_Size, e.g. PySequence_Size and PyDict_Size. In |
| 1798 | previous versions, the abstract interfaces used PyXXX_Length and the |
| 1799 | concrete interfaces used PyXXX_Size. The old names, |
| 1800 | e.g. PyObject_Length, are still available for backwards compatibility |
| 1801 | at the API level, but are deprecated. |
| 1802 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1803 | The PyOS_CheckStack function has been implemented on Windows by |
| 1804 | Fredrik Lundh. It prevents Python from failing with a stack overflow |
| 1805 | on Windows. |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1806 | |
| 1807 | The GC changes resulted in creation of two new slots on object, |
| 1808 | tp_traverse and tp_clear. The augmented assignment changes result in |
Guido van Rossum | 4338a28 | 2000-09-06 13:02:08 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1809 | the creation of a new slot for each in-place operator. |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1810 | |
| 1811 | The GC API creates new requirements for container types implemented in |
Guido van Rossum | 4338a28 | 2000-09-06 13:02:08 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1812 | C extension modules. See Include/objimpl.h for details. |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1813 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1814 | PyErr_Format has been updated to automatically calculate the size of |
| 1815 | the buffer needed to hold the formatted result string. This change |
| 1816 | prevents crashes caused by programmer error. |
Jeremy Hylton | bdebd54 | 2000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1817 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1818 | New C API calls: PyObject_AsFileDescriptor, PyErr_WriteUnraisable. |
Guido van Rossum | e905e95 | 2000-09-05 12:42:46 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1819 | |
Jeremy Hylton | 24c3d60 | 2000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1820 | PyRun_AnyFileEx, PyRun_SimpleFileEx, PyRun_FileEx -- New functions |
| 1821 | that are the same as their non-Ex counterparts except they take an |
| 1822 | extra flag argument that tells them to close the file when done. |
| 1823 | |
| 1824 | 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] | 1825 | |
Tim Peters | 8b09233 | 2000-09-05 20:15:25 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1826 | |
| 1827 | Windows Changes |
| 1828 | --------------- |
| 1829 | |
| 1830 | New popen2/popen3/peopen4 in os module (see Changed Modules above). |
| 1831 | |
| 1832 | os.popen is much more usable on Windows 95 and 98. See Microsoft |
| 1833 | Knowledge Base article Q150956. The Win9x workaround described there |
| 1834 | is implemented by the new w9xpopen.exe helper in the root of your |
| 1835 | Python installation. Note that Python uses this internally; it is not |
| 1836 | a standalone program. |
| 1837 | |
| 1838 | Administrator privileges are no longer required to install Python |
| 1839 | on Windows NT or Windows 2000. If you have administrator privileges, |
| 1840 | Python's registry info will be written under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. |
| 1841 | Otherwise the installer backs off to writing Python's registry info |
Guido van Rossum | 4338a28 | 2000-09-06 13:02:08 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1842 | under HKEY_CURRENT_USER. The latter is sufficient for all "normal" |
Tim Peters | 8b09233 | 2000-09-05 20:15:25 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1843 | uses of Python, but will prevent some advanced uses from working |
| 1844 | (for example, running a Python script as an NT service, or possibly |
| 1845 | from CGI). |
| 1846 | |
| 1847 | [This was new in 1.6] The installer no longer runs a separate Tcl/Tk |
| 1848 | installer; instead, it installs the needed Tcl/Tk files directly in the |
| 1849 | Python directory. If you already have a Tcl/Tk installation, this |
| 1850 | wastes some disk space (about 4 Megs) but avoids problems with |
| 1851 | conflicting Tcl/Tk installations, and makes it much easier for Python |
| 1852 | to ensure that Tcl/Tk can find all its files. |
| 1853 | |
| 1854 | [This was new in 1.6] The Windows installer now installs by default in |
| 1855 | \Python20\ on the default volume, instead of \Program Files\Python-2.0\. |
| 1856 | |
Guido van Rossum | f62ed9c | 2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1857 | |
| 1858 | Updates to the changes between 1.5.2 and 1.6 |
| 1859 | -------------------------------------------- |
| 1860 | |
| 1861 | The 1.6 NEWS file can't be changed after the release is done, so here |
| 1862 | is some late-breaking news: |
| 1863 | |
| 1864 | New APIs in locale.py: normalize(), getdefaultlocale(), resetlocale(), |
| 1865 | and changes to getlocale() and setlocale(). |
| 1866 | |
| 1867 | The new module is now enabled per default. |
| 1868 | |
| 1869 | It is not true that the encodings codecs cannot be used for normal |
| 1870 | strings: the string.encode() (which is also present on 8-bit strings |
| 1871 | !) allows using them for 8-bit strings too, e.g. to convert files from |
| 1872 | cp1252 (Windows) to latin-1 or vice-versa. |
| 1873 | |
| 1874 | Japanese codecs are available from Tamito KAJIYAMA: |
| 1875 | http://pseudo.grad.sccs.chukyo-u.ac.jp/~kajiyama/python/ |
| 1876 | |
| 1877 | |
Guido van Rossum | ab9d6f0 | 1998-08-10 22:01:13 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1878 | ====================================================================== |