Doc/whatsnew/3.1.rst

****************************
  What's New In Python 3.1
****************************

.. XXX Add trademark info for Apple, Microsoft.

:Author: Raymond Hettinger
:Release: |release|
:Date: |today|

.. $Id$
   Rules for maintenance:

   * Anyone can add text to this document.  Do not spend very much time
   on the wording of your changes, because your text will probably
   get rewritten to some degree.

   * The maintainer will go through Misc/NEWS periodically and add
   changes; it's therefore more important to add your changes to
   Misc/NEWS than to this file.  (Note: I didn't get to this for 3.0.
   GvR.)

   * This is not a complete list of every single change; completeness
   is the purpose of Misc/NEWS.  Some changes I consider too small
   or esoteric to include.  If such a change is added to the text,
   I'll just remove it.  (This is another reason you shouldn't spend
   too much time on writing your addition.)

   * If you want to draw your new text to the attention of the
   maintainer, add 'XXX' to the beginning of the paragraph or
   section.

   * It's OK to just add a fragmentary note about a change.  For
   example: "XXX Describe the transmogrify() function added to the
   socket module."  The maintainer will research the change and
   write the necessary text.

   * You can comment out your additions if you like, but it's not
   necessary (especially when a final release is some months away).

   * Credit the author of a patch or bugfix.   Just the name is
   sufficient; the e-mail address isn't necessary.  (Due to time
   constraints I haven't managed to do this for 3.0.  GvR.)

   * It's helpful to add the bug/patch number as a comment:

   % Patch 12345
   XXX Describe the transmogrify() function added to the socket
   module.
   (Contributed by P.Y. Developer.)

   This saves the maintainer the effort of going through the SVN log
   when researching a change.  (Again, I didn't get to this for 3.0.
   GvR.)

This article explains the new features in Python 3.1, compared to 3.0.

.. Compare with previous release in 2 - 3 sentences here.
.. add hyperlink when the documentation becomes available online.

.. ======================================================================
.. Large, PEP-level features and changes should be described here.
.. Should there be a new section here for 3k migration?
.. Or perhaps a more general section describing module changes/deprecation?
.. sets module deprecated
.. ======================================================================


PEP 372: Ordered Dictionaries
=============================

Regular Python dictionaries iterate over key/value pairs in arbitrary order.
Over the years, a number of authors have written alternative implementations
that remember the order that the keys were originally inserted.  Based on
the experiences from those implementations, the :mod:`collections` module
now has an :class:`OrderedDict` class.

The OrderedDict API is substantially the same as regular dictionaries
but will iterate over keys and values in a guaranteed order depending on
when a key was first inserted.  If a new entry overwrites an existing entry,
the original insertion position is left unchanged.  Deleting an entry and
reinserting it will move it to the end.

The standard library now supports use of ordered dictionaries in several
modules.  The :mod:`ConfigParser` modules uses them by default.  This lets
configuration files be read, modified, and then written back in their original
order.  The :mod:`collections` module's :meth:`namedtuple._asdict` method now
returns a dictionary with the values appearing in the same order as the
underlying tuple.count  The :mod:`json` module is being built-out with an
*object_pairs_hook* to allow OrderedDicts to be built by the decoder.
Support was also builtin for third-party tools like PyYAML.

.. seealso::

   :pep:`372` - Ordered Dictionaries
      PEP written by Armin Roancher and Raymond D. Hettinger; implemented by
      Raymond Hettinger

PEP 378: Format Specifier for Thousands Separator
=================================================

The builtin :func:`format` function and the :meth:`str.format` method use
a mini-language that now includes a simple, non-locale aware way to format
a number with a thousands separator.  That provides a way to humanize a
program's output, improving its professional appearance and readability::

    >>> format(Decimal('1234567.89'), ',f')
    '1,234,567.89'

The currently supported types are :class:`int` and :class:`Decimal`.
Support for :class:`float` is expected before the beta release.
Discussions are underway about how to specify alternative separators
like dots, spaces, apostrophes, or underscores.

.. seealso::

   :pep:`378` - Format Specifier for Thousands Separator
      PEP written by Raymond Hettinger; implemented by Eric Smith and
      Mark Dickinson.


Other Language Changes
======================

Some smaller changes made to the core Python language are:

* The :func:`int` type gained a ``bit_length`` method that returns the
  number of bits necessary to represent its argument in binary::

      >>> n = 37
      >>> bin(37)
      '0b100101'
      >>> n.bit_length()
      6
      >>> n = 2**123-1
      >>> n.bit_length()
      123
      >>> (n+1).bit_length()
      124

  (Contributed by Fredrik Johansson and Victor Stinner; :issue:`3439`.)

* Integers are now stored internally either in base 2**15 or in base
  2**30, the base being determined at build time.  Previously, they
  were always stored in base 2**15.  Using base 2**30 gives
  significant performance improvements on 64-bit machines, but
  benchmark results on 32-bit machines have been mixed.  Therefore,
  the default is to use base 2**30 on 64-bit machines and base 2**15
  on 32-bit machines; on Unix, there's a new configure option
  --enable-big-digits that can be used to override this default.

  Apart from the performance improvements this change should be
  invisible to end users, with one exception: for testing and
  debugging purposes there's a new structseq ``sys.int_info`` that
  provides information about the internal format, giving the number of
  bits per digit and the size in bytes of the C type used to store
  each digit::

     >>> import sys
     >>> sys.int_info
     sys.int_info(bits_per_digit=30, sizeof_digit=4)

  (Contributed by Mark Dickinson; :issue:`4258`.)


* Added a :class:`collections.Counter` class to support convenient
  counting of unique items in a sequence or iterable::

      >>> Counter(['red', 'blue', 'red', 'green', 'blue', 'blue'])
      Counter({'blue': 3, 'red': 2, 'green': 1})

  (Contributed by Raymond Hettinger; :issue:`1696199`.)

* The :class:`gzip.GzipFile` and :class:`bz2.BZ2File` classs now support
  the context manager protocol.

  (Contributed by Jacques Frechet; :issue:`4272`.)

* The :mod:`Decimal` module now supports two new methods to create a
  decimal object that from a binary :class:`float`.  The conversion is
  exact but can sometimes be surprising::

      >>> Decimal.from_float(1.1)
      Decimal('1.100000000000000088817841970012523233890533447265625')

  The long decimal result shows the actual binary fraction being
  stored for *1.1*.  The fraction has many digits because *1.1* cannot
  be exactly represented in binary.

  (Contributed by Raymond Hettinger and Mark Dickinson.)

* The fields in :func:`format` strings can now be automatically
  numbered::

    >>> 'Sir {} of {}'.format('Gallahad', 'Camelot')
    'Sir Gallahad of Camelot'

  Formerly, the string would have required numbered fields such as:
  ``'Sir {0} of {1}'``.

  (Contributed by Eric Smith; :issue:`5237`.)

* The :mod:`itertools` module grew two new functions.  The
  :func:`itertools.combinations_with_replacement` function is one of
  four for generating combinatorics including permutations and Cartesian
  products.  The :func:`itertools.compress` function mimics its namesake
  from APL.  Also, the existing :func:`itertools.count` function now has
  an optional *step* argument and can accept any type of counting
  sequence including :class:`fractions.Fraction` and
  :class:`decimal.Decimal`.

  (Contributed by Raymond Hettinger.)


.. ======================================================================


Optimizations
-------------

Major performance enhancements have been added:

* The new I/O library (as defined in :pep:`3116`) was mostly written in
  Python and quickly proved to be a problematic bottleneck in Python 3.0.
  In Python 3.1, the I/O library has been entirely rewritten in C and is
  2 to 20 times faster depending on the task at hand. The pure Python
  version is still available for experimentation purposes through
  the ``_pyio`` module.

  (Contributed by Amaury Forgeot d'Arc and Antoine Pitrou.)

* A new configure flag, ``--with-computed-gotos``, enables a faster opcode
  dispatch mechanism on compilers which support it. Speedups of up to 20%
  have been observed, depending on the system and compiler.

  (Contributed by Antoine Pitrou, :issue:`4753`.)

* Add a heuristic so that tuples and dicts containing only untrackable objects
  are not tracked by the garbage collector. This can reduce the size of
  collections and therefore the garbage collection overhead on long-running
  programs, depending on their particular use of datatypes.

  (Contributed by Antoine Pitrou, :issue:`4688`.)

XXX The JSON module is getting a C extension for speed.

.. ======================================================================