blob: 0ccf8baeac51080698c9e70a3598fbe3b5f5469f [file] [log] [blame]
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00001What's New in Python 2.1 alpha 1?
2=================================
3
4Core language, builtins, and interpreter
5
Guido van Rossum1cc8f832001-01-12 16:25:08 +00006- Two changes to from...import:
7
8 1) "from M import X" now works even if M is not a real module; it's
9 basically a getattr() operation with AttributeError exceptions
10 changed into ImportError.
11
12 2) "from M import *" now looks for M.__all__ to decide which names to
13 import; if M.__all__ doesn't exist, it uses M.__dict__.keys() but
14 filters out names starting with '_' as before. Whether or not
15 __all__ exists, there's no restriction on the type of M.
16
Guido van Rossumf61f1662001-01-10 20:13:55 +000017- File objects have a new method, xreadlines(). This is the fastest
18 way to iterate over all lines in a file:
19
20 for line in file.xreadlines():
21 ...do something to line...
22
23 See the xreadlines module (mentioned below) for how to do this for
24 other file-like objects.
25
26- Even if you don't use file.xreadlines(), you may expect a speedup on
27 line-by-line input. The file.readline() method has been optimized
Tim Petersf29b64d2001-01-15 06:33:19 +000028 quite a bit in platform-specific ways: on systems (like Linux) that
29 support flockfile(), getc_unlocked(), and funlockfile(), those are
30 used by default. On systems (like Windows) without getc_unlocked(),
31 a complicated (but still thread-safe) method using fgets() is used by
32 default.
33
34 You can force use of the fgets() method by #define'ing
35 USE_FGETS_IN_GETLINE at build time (it may be faster than
36 getc_unlocked()).
37
38 You can force fgets() not to be used by #define'ing
39 DONT_USE_FGETS_IN_GETLINE (this is the first thing to try if std test
40 test_bufio.py fails -- and let us know if it does!).
41
42- In addition, the fileinput module, while still slower than the other
43 methods on most platforms, has been sped up too, by using
44 file.readlines(sizehint).
Guido van Rossumf61f1662001-01-10 20:13:55 +000045
46- Support for run-time warnings has been added, including a new
47 command line option (-W) to specify the disposition of warnings.
48 See the description of the warnings module below.
49
50- Extensive changes have been made to the coercion code. This mostly
51 affects extension modules (which can now implement mixed-type
52 numerical operators without having to use coercion), but
53 occasionally, in boundary cases the coercion semantics have changed
54 subtly. Since this was a terrible gray area of the language, this
Guido van Rossumae72d872001-01-11 15:00:14 +000055 is considered an improvement. Also note that __rcmp__ is no longer
Guido van Rossumf61f1662001-01-10 20:13:55 +000056 supported -- instead of calling __rcmp__, __cmp__ is called with
57 reversed arguments.
58
Martin v. Löwisbe4c0f52001-01-04 20:30:56 +000059- The interpreter accepts now bytecode files on the command line even
60 if they do not have a .pyc or .pyo extension. On Linux, after executing
61
62 echo ':pyc:M::\x87\xc6\x0d\x0a::/usr/local/bin/python:' > /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register
63
64 any byte code file can be used as an executable (i.e. as an argument
65 to execve(2)).
66
Tim Peters9940b802000-12-01 07:59:35 +000067- %[xXo] formats of negative Python longs now produce a sign
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +000068 character. In 1.6 and earlier, they never produced a sign,
69 and raised an error if the value of the long was too large
70 to fit in a Python int. In 2.0, they produced a sign if and
71 only if too large to fit in an int. This was inconsistent
72 across platforms (because the size of an int varies across
73 platforms), and inconsistent with hex() and oct(). Example:
74
75 >>> "%x" % -0x42L
Tim Peters9940b802000-12-01 07:59:35 +000076 '-42' # in 2.1
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +000077 'ffffffbe' # in 2.0 and before, on 32-bit machines
78 >>> hex(-0x42L)
79 '-0x42L' # in all versions of Python
80
Tim Peters9940b802000-12-01 07:59:35 +000081 The behavior of %d formats for negative Python longs remains
82 the same as in 2.0 (although in 1.6 and before, they raised
83 an error if the long didn't fit in a Python int).
84
85 %u formats don't make sense for Python longs, but are allowed
86 and treated the same as %d in 2.1. In 2.0, a negative long
87 formatted via %u produced a sign if and only if too large to
88 fit in an int. In 1.6 and earlier, a negative long formatted
89 via %u raised an error if it was too big to fit in an int.
90
Guido van Rossum3661d392000-12-12 22:10:31 +000091- Dictionary objects have an odd new method, popitem(). This removes
92 an arbitrary item from the dictionary and returns it (in the form of
93 a (key, value) pair). This can be useful for algorithms that use a
94 dictionary as a bag of "to do" items and repeatedly need to pick one
95 item. Such algorithms normally end up running in quadratic time;
96 using popitem() they can usually be made to run in linear time.
97
Tim Peters36cdad12000-12-29 02:06:45 +000098Standard library
99
Martin v. Löwis10a27872001-01-13 09:54:41 +0000100- The module site now treats .pth files not only for path configuration,
101 but also supports extensions to the initialization code: Lines starting
102 with import are executed.
103
Guido van Rossumf61f1662001-01-10 20:13:55 +0000104- There's a new module, warnings, which implements a mechanism for
105 issuing and filtering warnings. There are some new built-in
106 exceptions that serve as warning categories, and a new command line
107 option, -W, to control warnings (e.g. -Wi ignores all warnings, -We
108 turns warnings into errors). warnings.warn(message[, category])
109 issues a warning message; this can also be called from C as
110 PyErr_Warn(category, message).
111
112- A new module xreadlines was added. This exports a single factory
113 function, xreadlines(). The intention is that this code is the
114 absolutely fastest way to iterate over all lines in an open
115 file(-like) object:
116
117 import xreadlines
118 for line in xreadlines.xreadlines(file):
119 ...do something to line...
120
121 This is equivalent to the previous the speed record holder using
122 file.readlines(sizehint). Note that if file is a real file object
123 (as opposed to a file-like object), this is equivalent:
124
125 for line in file.xreadlines():
126 ...do something to line...
127
Tim Peters36cdad12000-12-29 02:06:45 +0000128- The bisect module has new functions bisect_left, insort_left,
129 bisect_right and insort_right. The old names bisect and insort
130 are now aliases for bisect_right and insort_right. XXX_right
131 and XXX_left methods differ in what happens when the new element
132 compares equal to one or more elements already in the list: the
133 XXX_left methods insert to the left, the XXX_right methods to the
Tim Peters742bb6f2001-01-05 08:05:32 +0000134 right. Code that doesn't care where equal elements end up should
135 continue to use the old, short names ("bisect" and "insort").
Tim Peters36cdad12000-12-29 02:06:45 +0000136
Andrew M. Kuchlingf6f3a892001-01-13 14:53:34 +0000137- The new curses.panel module wraps the panel library that forms part
138 of SYSV curses and ncurses. Contributed by Thomas Gellekum.
139
Guido van Rossumf61f1662001-01-10 20:13:55 +0000140- The SocketServer module now sets the allow_reuse_address flag by
141 default in the TCPServer class.
142
143- A new function, sys._getframe(), returns the stack frame pointer of
144 the caller. This is intended only as a building block for
145 higher-level mechanisms such as string interpolation.
146
147Build issues
148
149- On Linux (and possibly other Unix platforms), the readline and
150 _curses modules are automatically configured through
151 Modules/Setup.config. These, and the bsddb module (which was
152 already dynamically configured) are now built as shared libraries by
153 default.
154
155- Python now always uses its own (renamed) implementation of getopt()
156 -- there's too much variation among C library getopt()
157 implementations.
158
159- C++ compilers are better supported; the CXX macro is always set to a
160 C++ compiler if one is found.
Tim Peters36cdad12000-12-29 02:06:45 +0000161
Tim Petersd92dfe02000-12-12 01:18:41 +0000162Windows changes
163
164- select module: By default under Windows, a select() call
165 can specify no more than 64 sockets. Python now boosts
166 this Microsoft default to 512. If you need even more than
167 that, see the MS docs (you'll need to #define FD_SETSIZE
168 and recompile Python from source).
169
Guido van Rossumf61f1662001-01-10 20:13:55 +0000170- Support for Windows 3.1, DOS and OS/2 is gone. The Lib/dos-8x3
171 subdirectory is no more!
172
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000173
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000174What's New in Python 2.0?
Fred Drake1a640502000-10-16 20:27:25 +0000175=========================
Guido van Rossum61000331997-08-15 04:39:58 +0000176
Guido van Rossum8ed602b2000-09-01 22:34:33 +0000177Below is a list of all relevant changes since release 1.6. Older
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000178changes are in the file HISTORY. If you are making the jump directly
179from Python 1.5.2 to 2.0, make sure to read the section for 1.6 in the
180HISTORY file! Many important changes listed there.
Guido van Rossum61000331997-08-15 04:39:58 +0000181
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000182Alternatively, a good overview of the changes between 1.5.2 and 2.0 is
183the document "What's New in Python 2.0" by Kuchling and Moshe Zadka:
184http://starship.python.net/crew/amk/python/writing/new-python/.
Guido van Rossum1f83cce1997-10-06 21:04:35 +0000185
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000186--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.pythonlabs.com/~guido/)
Guido van Rossum437cfe81999-04-08 20:17:57 +0000187
188======================================================================
189
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000190What's new in 2.0 (since release candidate 1)?
191==============================================
192
193Standard library
194
195- The copy_reg module was modified to clarify its intended use: to
196 register pickle support for extension types, not for classes.
197 pickle() will raise a TypeError if it is passed a class.
198
199- Fixed a bug in gettext's "normalize and expand" code that prevented
200 it from finding an existing .mo file.
201
202- Restored support for HTTP/0.9 servers in httplib.
203
Tim Peters989b7b92000-10-16 20:24:53 +0000204- The math module was changed to stop raising OverflowError in case of
205 underflow, and return 0 instead in underflow cases. Whether Python
206 used to raise OverflowError in case of underflow was platform-
207 dependent (it did when the platform math library set errno to ERANGE
208 on underflow).
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000209
210- Fixed a bug in StringIO that occurred when the file position was not
211 at the end of the file and write() was called with enough data to
212 extend past the end of the file.
213
214- Fixed a bug that caused Tkinter error messages to get lost on
215 Windows. The bug was fixed by replacing direct use of
216 interp->result with Tcl_GetStringResult(interp).
217
218- Fixed bug in urllib2 that caused it to fail when it received an HTTP
219 redirect response.
220
221- Several changes were made to distutils: Some debugging code was
222 removed from util. Fixed the installer used when an external zip
223 program (like WinZip) is not found; the source code for this
224 installer is in Misc/distutils. check_lib() was modified to behave
225 more like AC_CHECK_LIB by add other_libraries() as a parameter. The
226 test for whether installed modules are on sys.path was changed to
227 use both normcase() and normpath().
228
Jeremy Hyltond867a2c2000-10-16 20:41:38 +0000229- Several minor bugs were fixed in the xml package (the minidom,
230 pulldom, expatreader, and saxutils modules).
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000231
232- The regression test driver (regrtest.py) behavior when invoked with
233 -l changed: It now reports a count of objects that are recognized as
234 garbage but not freed by the garbage collector.
235
Tim Peters989b7b92000-10-16 20:24:53 +0000236- The regression test for the math module was changed to test
237 exceptional behavior when the test is run in verbose mode. Python
238 cannot yet guarantee consistent exception behavior across platforms,
239 so the exception part of test_math is run only in verbose mode, and
240 may fail on your platform.
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000241
242Internals
243
244- PyOS_CheckStack() has been disabled on Win64, where it caused
245 test_sre to fail.
246
247Build issues
248
249- Changed compiler flags, so that gcc is always invoked with -Wall and
250 -Wstrict-prototypes. Users compiling Python with GCC should see
251 exactly one warning, except if they have passed configure the
Tim Peters989b7b92000-10-16 20:24:53 +0000252 --with-pydebug flag. The expected warning is for getopt() in
Tim Petersadfb94f2000-10-16 20:51:33 +0000253 Modules/main.c. This warning will be fixed for Python 2.1.
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000254
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000255- Fixed configure to add -threads argument during linking on OSF1.
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000256
257Tools and other miscellany
258
259- The compiler in Tools/compiler was updated to support the new
260 language features introduced in 2.0: extended print statement, list
261 comprehensions, and augmented assignments. The new compiler should
262 also be backwards compatible with Python 1.5.2; the compiler will
263 always generate code for the version of the interpreter it runs
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000264 under.
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000265
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000266What's new in 2.0 release candidate 1 (since beta 2)?
267=====================================================
268
Jeremy Hylton6040aaa2000-10-09 21:27:22 +0000269What is release candidate 1?
270
271We believe that release candidate 1 will fix all known bugs that we
272intend to fix for the 2.0 final release. This release should be a bit
273more stable than the previous betas. We would like to see even more
274widespread testing before the final release, so we are producing this
275release candidate. The final release will be exactly the same unless
276any show-stopping (or brown bag) bugs are found by testers of the
277release candidate.
278
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000279All the changes since the last beta release are bug fixes or changes
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000280to support building Python for specific platforms.
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000281
282Core language, builtins, and interpreter
283
284- A bug that caused crashes when __coerce__ was used with augmented
285 assignment, e.g. +=, was fixed.
286
287- Raise ZeroDivisionError when raising zero to a negative number,
288 e.g. 0.0 ** -2.0. Note that math.pow is unrelated to the builtin
289 power operator and the result of math.pow(0.0, -2.0) will vary by
290 platform. On Linux, it raises a ValueError.
291
292- A bug in Unicode string interpolation was fixed that occasionally
293 caused errors with formats including "%%". For example, the
294 following expression "%% %s" % u"abc" no longer raises a TypeError.
295
296- Compilation of deeply nested expressions raises MemoryError instead
297 of SyntaxError, e.g. eval("[" * 50 + "]" * 50).
298
299- In 2.0b2 on Windows, the interpreter wrote .pyc files in text mode,
300 rendering them useless. They are now written in binary mode again.
301
302Standard library
303
304- Keyword arguments are now accepted for most pattern and match object
305 methods in SRE, the standard regular expression engine.
306
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000307- In SRE, fixed error with negative lookahead and lookbehind that
Jeremy Hylton32e20ff2000-10-09 19:48:11 +0000308 manifested itself as a runtime error in patterns like "(?<!abc)(def)".
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000309
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000310- Several bugs in the Unicode handling and error handling in _tkinter
311 were fixed.
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000312
313- Fix memory management errors in Merge() and Tkapp_Call() routines.
314
315- Several changes were made to cStringIO to make it compatible with
316 the file-like object interface and with StringIO. If operations are
317 performed on a closed object, an exception is raised. The truncate
318 method now accepts a position argument and readline accepts a size
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000319 argument.
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000320
321- There were many changes made to the linuxaudiodev module and its
322 test suite; as a result, a short, unexpected audio sample should now
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000323 play when the regression test is run.
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000324
325 Note that this module is named poorly, because it should work
326 correctly on any platform that supports the Open Sound System
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000327 (OSS).
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000328
329 The module now raises exceptions when errors occur instead of
330 crashing. It also defines the AFMT_A_LAW format (logarithmic A-law
331 audio) and defines a getptr() method that calls the
332 SNDCTL_DSP_GETxPTR ioctl defined in the OSS Programmer's Guide.
333
334- The library_version attribute, introduced in an earlier beta, was
335 removed because it can not be supported with early versions of the C
336 readline library, which provides no way to determine the version at
337 compile-time.
338
339- The binascii module is now enabled on Win64.
340
Tim Peters46446d62000-10-09 21:19:31 +0000341- tokenize.py no longer suffers "recursion depth" errors when parsing
342 programs with very long string literals.
343
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000344Internals
345
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000346- Fixed several buffer overflow vulnerabilities in calculate_path(),
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000347 which is called when the interpreter starts up to determine where
348 the standard library is installed. These vulnerabilities affect all
349 previous versions of Python and can be exploited by setting very
350 long values for PYTHONHOME or argv[0]. The risk is greatest for a
351 setuid Python script, although use of the wrapper in
352 Misc/setuid-prog.c will eliminate the vulnerability.
353
354- Fixed garbage collection bugs in instance creation that were
355 triggered when errors occurred during initialization. The solution,
356 applied in cPickle and in PyInstance_New(), is to call
357 PyObject_GC_Init() after the initialization of the object's
358 container attributes is complete.
359
360- pyexpat adds definitions of PyModule_AddStringConstant and
361 PyModule_AddObject if the Python version is less than 2.0, which
362 provides compatibility with PyXML on Python 1.5.2.
363
364- If the platform has a bogus definition for LONG_BIT (the number of
365 bits in a long), an error will be reported at compile time.
366
367- Fix bugs in _PyTuple_Resize() which caused hard-to-interpret garbage
368 collection crashes and possibly other, unreported crashes.
369
370- Fixed a memory leak in _PyUnicode_Fini().
371
372Build issues
373
374- configure now accepts a --with-suffix option that specifies the
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000375 executable suffix. This is useful for builds on Cygwin and Mac OS
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000376 X, for example.
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000377
378- The mmap.PAGESIZE constant is now initialized using sysconf when
379 possible, which eliminates a dependency on -lucb for Reliant UNIX.
380
381- The md5 file should now compile on all platforms.
382
383- The select module now compiles on platforms that do not define
384 POLLRDNORM and related constants.
385
386- Darwin (Mac OS X): Initial support for static builds on this
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000387 platform.
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000388
Jeremy Hylton10921202000-10-09 18:34:12 +0000389- BeOS: A number of changes were made to the build and installation
390 process. ar-fake now operates on a directory of object files.
391 dl_export.h is gone, and its macros now appear on the mwcc command
392 line during build on PPC BeOS.
393
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +0000394- Platform directory in lib/python2.0 is "plat-beos5" (or
Jeremy Hylton10921202000-10-09 18:34:12 +0000395 "plat-beos4", if building on BeOS 4.5), rather than "plat-beos".
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +0000396
397- Cygwin: Support for shared libraries, Tkinter, and sockets.
398
399- SunOS 4.1.4_JL: Fix test for directory existence in configure.
400
401Tools and other miscellany
402
403- Removed debugging prints from main used with freeze.
404
Tim Peters46446d62000-10-09 21:19:31 +0000405- IDLE auto-indent no longer crashes when it encounters Unicode
406 characters.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000407
408What's new in 2.0 beta 2 (since beta 1)?
409========================================
410
411Core language, builtins, and interpreter
412
Tim Peters482c0212000-09-26 06:33:09 +0000413- Add support for unbounded ints in %d,i,u,x,X,o formats; for example
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000414 "%d" % 2L**64 == "18446744073709551616".
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000415
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000416- Add -h and -V command line options to print the usage message and
417 Python version number and exit immediately.
418
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000419- eval() and exec accept Unicode objects as code parameters.
420
421- getattr() and setattr() now also accept Unicode objects for the
422 attribute name, which are converted to strings using the default
423 encoding before lookup.
424
425- Multiplication on string and Unicode now does proper bounds
426 checking; e.g. 'a' * 65536 * 65536 will raise ValueError, "repeated
427 string is too long."
428
429- Better error message when continue is found in try statement in a
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000430 loop.
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000431
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000432
433Standard library and extensions
434
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000435- array: reverse() method of array now works. buffer_info() now does
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000436 argument checking; it still takes no arguments.
437
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000438- asyncore/asynchat: Included most recent version from Sam Rushing.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000439
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000440- cgi: Accept '&' or ';' as separator characters when parsing form data.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000441
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000442- CGIHTTPServer: Now works on Windows (and perhaps even Mac).
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000443
444- ConfigParser: When reading the file, options spelled in upper case
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000445 letters are now correctly converted to lowercase.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000446
447- copy: Copy Unicode objects atomically.
448
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000449- cPickle: Fail gracefully when copy_reg can't be imported.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000450
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000451- cStringIO: Implemented readlines() method.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000452
Fred Drake67233bc2000-09-26 16:40:27 +0000453- dbm: Add get() and setdefault() methods to dbm object. Add constant
454 `library' to module that names the library used. Added doc strings
455 and method names to error messages. Uses configure to determine
456 which ndbm.h file to include; Berkeley DB's nbdm and GDBM's ndbm is
457 now available options.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000458
459- distutils: Update to version 0.9.3.
460
461- dl: Add several dl.RTLD_ constants.
462
463- fpectl: Now supported on FreeBSD.
464
465- gc: Add DEBUG_SAVEALL option. When enabled all garbage objects
466 found by the collector will be saved in gc.garbage. This is useful
467 for debugging a program that creates reference cycles.
468
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000469- httplib: Three changes: Restore support for set_debuglevel feature
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000470 of HTTP class. Do not close socket on zero-length response. Do not
471 crash when server sends invalid content-length header.
472
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000473- mailbox: Mailbox class conforms better to qmail specifications.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000474
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000475- marshal: When reading a short, sign-extend on platforms where shorts
476 are bigger than 16 bits. When reading a long, repair the unportable
477 sign extension that was being done for 64-bit machines. (It assumed
478 that signed right shift sign-extends.)
479
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000480- operator: Add contains(), invert(), __invert__() as aliases for
481 __contains__(), inv(), and __inv__() respectively.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000482
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000483- os: Add support for popen2() and popen3() on all platforms where
484 fork() exists. (popen4() is still in the works.)
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000485
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000486- os: (Windows only:) Add startfile() function that acts like double-
Tim Peters482c0212000-09-26 06:33:09 +0000487 clicking on a file in Explorer (or passing the file name to the
488 DOS "start" command).
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000489
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000490- os.path: (Windows, DOS:) Treat trailing colon correctly in
Tim Peters482c0212000-09-26 06:33:09 +0000491 os.path.join. os.path.join("a:", "b") yields "a:b".
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000492
493- pickle: Now raises ValueError when an invalid pickle that contains
494 a non-string repr where a string repr was expected. This behavior
495 matches cPickle.
496
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000497- posixfile: Remove broken __del__() method.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000498
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000499- py_compile: support CR+LF line terminators in source file.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000500
501- readline: Does not immediately exit when ^C is hit when readline and
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000502 threads are configured. Adds definition of rl_library_version. (The
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000503 latter addition requires GNU readline 2.2 or later.)
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000504
505- rfc822: Domain literals returned by AddrlistClass method
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000506 getdomainliteral() are now properly wrapped in brackets.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000507
508- site: sys.setdefaultencoding() should only be called in case the
Tim Peters482c0212000-09-26 06:33:09 +0000509 standard default encoding ("ascii") is changed. This saves quite a
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000510 few cycles during startup since the first call to
511 setdefaultencoding() will initialize the codec registry and the
512 encodings package.
513
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000514- socket: Support for size hint in readlines() method of object returned
515 by makefile().
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000516
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000517- sre: Added experimental expand() method to match objects. Does not
Jeremy Hylton625915e2000-10-02 13:43:33 +0000518 use buffer interface on Unicode strings. Does not hang if group id
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000519 is followed by whitespace.
520
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000521- StringIO: Size hint in readlines() is now supported as documented.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000522
523- struct: Check ranges for bytes and shorts.
524
525- urllib: Improved handling of win32 proxy settings. Fixed quote and
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000526 quote_plus functions so that the always encode a comma.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000527
528- Tkinter: Image objects are now guaranteed to have unique ids. Set
529 event.delta to zero if Tk version doesn't support mousewheel.
530 Removed some debugging prints.
531
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000532- UserList: now implements __contains__().
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000533
Fred Drake67233bc2000-09-26 16:40:27 +0000534- webbrowser: On Windows, use os.startfile() instead of os.popen(),
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000535 which works around a bug in Norton AntiVirus 2000 that leads directly
536 to a Blue Screen freeze.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000537
538- xml: New version detection code allows PyXML to override standard
539 XML package if PyXML version is greater than 0.6.1.
540
Fred Drake64bb3802000-09-26 16:21:35 +0000541- xml.dom: DOM level 1 support for basic XML. Includes xml.dom.minidom
542 (conventional DOM), and xml.dom.pulldom, which allows building the DOM
543 tree only for nodes which are sufficiently interesting to a specific
544 application. Does not provide the HTML-specific extensions. Still
545 undocumented.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000546
Fred Drake64bb3802000-09-26 16:21:35 +0000547- xml.sax: SAX 2 support for Python, including all the handler
548 interfaces needed to process XML 1.0 compliant XML. Some
549 documentation is already available.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000550
Fred Drake64bb3802000-09-26 16:21:35 +0000551- pyexpat: Renamed to xml.parsers.expat since this is part of the new,
552 packagized XML support.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000553
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000554
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000555C API
556
557- Add three new convenience functions for module initialization --
558 PyModule_AddObject(), PyModule_AddIntConstant(), and
559 PyModule_AddStringConstant().
560
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000561- Cleaned up definition of NULL in C source code; all definitions were
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000562 removed and add #error to Python.h if NULL isn't defined after
563 #include of stdio.h.
564
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000565- Py_PROTO() macros that were removed in 2.0b1 have been restored for
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000566 backwards compatibility (at the source level) with old extensions.
567
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000568- A wrapper API was added for signal() and sigaction(). Instead of
569 either function, always use PyOS_getsig() to get a signal handler
570 and PyOS_setsig() to set one. A new convenience typedef
571 PyOS_sighandler_t is defined for the type of signal handlers.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000572
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000573- Add PyString_AsStringAndSize() function that provides access to the
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000574 internal data buffer and size of a string object -- or the default
575 encoded version of a Unicode object.
576
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000577- PyString_Size() and PyString_AsString() accept Unicode objects.
578
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000579- The standard header <limits.h> is now included by Python.h (if it
Fred Drake64bb3802000-09-26 16:21:35 +0000580 exists). INT_MAX and LONG_MAX will always be defined, even if
581 <limits.h> is not available.
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000582
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000583- PyFloat_FromString takes a second argument, pend, that was
584 effectively useless. It is now officially useless but preserved for
585 backwards compatibility. If the pend argument is not NULL, *pend is
586 set to NULL.
587
588- PyObject_GetAttr() and PyObject_SetAttr() now accept Unicode objects
589 for the attribute name. See note on getattr() above.
590
591- A few bug fixes to argument processing for Unicode.
592 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() now accepts "es#" and "es".
593 PyArg_Parse() special cases "s#" for Unicode objects; it returns a
594 pointer to the default encoded string data instead of to the raw
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000595 UTF-16.
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000596
597- Py_BuildValue accepts B format (for bgen-generated code).
598
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000599
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000600Internals
601
602- On Unix, fix code for finding Python installation directory so that
603 it works when argv[0] is a relative path.
604
Andrew M. Kuchlinga1099be2000-12-15 01:16:43 +0000605- Added a true unicode_internal_encode() function and fixed the
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000606 unicode_internal_decode function() to support Unicode objects directly
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000607 rather than by generating a copy of the object.
608
Tim Peters482c0212000-09-26 06:33:09 +0000609- Several of the internal Unicode tables are much smaller now, and
610 the source code should be much friendlier to weaker compilers.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000611
Jeremy Hylton97693b02000-09-26 17:42:51 +0000612- In the garbage collector: Fixed bug in collection of tuples. Fixed
613 bug that caused some instances to be removed from the container set
614 while they were still live. Fixed parsing in gc.set_debug() for
615 platforms where sizeof(long) > sizeof(int).
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000616
617- Fixed refcount problem in instance deallocation that only occurred
618 when Py_REF_DEBUG was defined and Py_TRACE_REFS was not.
619
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000620- On Windows, getpythonregpath is now protected against null data in
621 registry key.
622
623- On Unix, create .pyc/.pyo files with O_EXCL flag to avoid a race
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000624 condition.
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000625
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000626
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000627Build and platform-specific issues
628
629- Better support of GNU Pth via --with-pth configure option.
630
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000631- Python/C API now properly exposed to dynamically-loaded extension
632 modules on Reliant UNIX.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000633
634- Changes for the benefit of SunOS 4.1.4 (really!). mmapmodule.c:
635 Don't define MS_SYNC to be zero when it is undefined. Added missing
636 prototypes in posixmodule.c.
637
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000638- Improved support for HP-UX build. Threads should now be correctly
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000639 configured (on HP-UX 10.20 and 11.00).
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000640
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000641- Fix largefile support on older NetBSD systems and OpenBSD by adding
642 define for TELL64.
643
644
645Tools and other miscellany
646
647- ftpmirror: Call to main() is wrapped in if __name__ == "__main__".
648
649- freeze: The modulefinder now works with 2.0 opcodes.
650
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +0000651- IDLE:
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +0000652 Move hackery of sys.argv until after the Tk instance has been
653 created, which allows the application-specific Tkinter
654 initialization to be executed if present; also pass an explicit
655 className parameter to the Tk() constructor.
Fred Drake64bb3802000-09-26 16:21:35 +0000656
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +0000657
658What's new in 2.0 beta 1?
659=========================
660
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000661Source Incompatibilities
662------------------------
663
664None. Note that 1.6 introduced several incompatibilities with 1.5.2,
665such as single-argument append(), connect() and bind(), and changes to
666str(long) and repr(float).
667
668
669Binary Incompatibilities
670------------------------
671
672- Third party extensions built for Python 1.5.x or 1.6 cannot be used
673with Python 2.0; these extensions will have to be rebuilt for Python
6742.0.
675
676- On Windows, attempting to import a third party extension built for
677Python 1.5.x or 1.6 results in an immediate crash; there's not much we
678can do about this. Check your PYTHONPATH environment variable!
679
680- Python bytecode files (*.pyc and *.pyo) are not compatible between
681releases.
682
683
684Overview of Changes Since 1.6
685-----------------------------
686
687There are many new modules (including brand new XML support through
688the xml package, and i18n support through the gettext module); a list
689of all new modules is included below. Lots of bugs have been fixed.
690
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000691The process for making major new changes to the language has changed
692since Python 1.6. Enhancements must now be documented by a Python
693Enhancement Proposal (PEP) before they can be accepted.
694
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000695There are several important syntax enhancements, described in more
696detail below:
697
698 - Augmented assignment, e.g. x += 1
699
700 - List comprehensions, e.g. [x**2 for x in range(10)]
701
702 - Extended import statement, e.g. import Module as Name
703
704 - Extended print statement, e.g. print >> file, "Hello"
705
706Other important changes:
707
708 - Optional collection of cyclical garbage
709
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000710Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP)
711---------------------------------
712
713PEP stands for Python Enhancement Proposal. A PEP is a design
714document providing information to the Python community, or describing
715a new feature for Python. The PEP should provide a concise technical
716specification of the feature and a rationale for the feature.
717
718We intend PEPs to be the primary mechanisms for proposing new
719features, for collecting community input on an issue, and for
720documenting the design decisions that have gone into Python. The PEP
721author is responsible for building consensus within the community and
722documenting dissenting opinions.
723
724The PEPs are available at http://python.sourceforge.net/peps/.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000725
726Augmented Assignment
727--------------------
728
729This must have been the most-requested feature of the past years!
730Eleven new assignment operators were added:
731
Guido van Rossume905e952000-09-05 12:42:46 +0000732 += -= *= /= %= **= <<= >>= &= ^= |=
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000733
734For example,
735
736 A += B
737
738is similar to
739
740 A = A + B
741
742except that A is evaluated only once (relevant when A is something
743like dict[index].attr).
744
745However, if A is a mutable object, A may be modified in place. Thus,
746if A is a number or a string, A += B has the same effect as A = A+B
747(except A is only evaluated once); but if a is a list, A += B has the
748same effect as A.extend(B)!
749
750Classes and built-in object types can override the new operators in
751order to implement the in-place behavior; the not-in-place behavior is
752used automatically as a fallback when an object doesn't implement the
753in-place behavior. For classes, the method name is derived from the
754method name for the corresponding not-in-place operator by inserting
755an 'i' in front of the name, e.g. __iadd__ implements in-place
756__add__.
757
758Augmented assignment was implemented by Thomas Wouters.
759
760
761List Comprehensions
762-------------------
763
764This is a flexible new notation for lists whose elements are computed
765from another list (or lists). The simplest form is:
766
767 [<expression> for <variable> in <sequence>]
768
Guido van Rossum56db0952000-09-06 23:34:25 +0000769For example, [i**2 for i in range(4)] yields the list [0, 1, 4, 9].
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000770This is more efficient than a for loop with a list.append() call.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000771
772You can also add a condition:
773
774 [<expression> for <variable> in <sequence> if <condition>]
775
776For example, [w for w in words if w == w.lower()] would yield the list
777of words that contain no uppercase characters. This is more efficient
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +0000778than a for loop with an if statement and a list.append() call.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000779
780You can also have nested for loops and more than one 'if' clause. For
781example, here's a function that flattens a sequence of sequences::
782
783 def flatten(seq):
784 return [x for subseq in seq for x in subseq]
785
786 flatten([[0], [1,2,3], [4,5], [6,7,8,9], []])
787
788This prints
789
790 [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
791
792List comprehensions originated as a patch set from Greg Ewing; Skip
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000793Montanaro and Thomas Wouters also contributed. Described by PEP 202.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000794
795
796Extended Import Statement
797-------------------------
798
799Many people have asked for a way to import a module under a different
800name. This can be accomplished like this:
801
802 import foo
803 bar = foo
804 del foo
805
806but this common idiom gets old quickly. A simple extension of the
807import statement now allows this to be written as follows:
808
809 import foo as bar
810
811There's also a variant for 'from ... import':
812
813 from foo import bar as spam
814
815This also works with packages; e.g. you can write this:
816
817 import test.regrtest as regrtest
818
819Note that 'as' is not a new keyword -- it is recognized only in this
820context (this is only possible because the syntax for the import
821statement doesn't involve expressions).
822
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000823Implemented by Thomas Wouters. Described by PEP 221.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000824
825
826Extended Print Statement
827------------------------
828
829Easily the most controversial new feature, this extension to the print
830statement adds an option to make the output go to a different file
831than the default sys.stdout.
832
833For example, to write an error message to sys.stderr, you can now
834write:
835
836 print >> sys.stderr, "Error: bad dog!"
837
838As a special feature, if the expression used to indicate the file
Fred Drake45888ff2000-09-29 17:09:11 +0000839evaluates to None, the current value of sys.stdout is used. Thus:
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000840
841 print >> None, "Hello world"
842
843is equivalent to
844
845 print "Hello world"
846
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000847Design and implementation by Barry Warsaw. Described by PEP 214.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000848
849
850Optional Collection of Cyclical Garbage
851---------------------------------------
852
853Python is now equipped with a garbage collector that can hunt down
854cyclical references between Python objects. It's no replacement for
855reference counting; in fact, it depends on the reference counts being
856correct, and decides that a set of objects belong to a cycle if all
857their reference counts can be accounted for from their references to
858each other. This devious scheme was first proposed by Eric Tiedemann,
859and brought to implementation by Neil Schemenauer.
860
861There's a module "gc" that lets you control some parameters of the
862garbage collection. There's also an option to the configure script
863that lets you enable or disable the garbage collection. In 2.0b1,
864it's on by default, so that we (hopefully) can collect decent user
865experience with this new feature. There are some questions about its
Fred Drake9f11cf82000-09-29 17:54:40 +0000866performance. If it proves to be too much of a problem, we'll turn it
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000867off by default in the final 2.0 release.
868
869
870Smaller Changes
871---------------
872
873A new function zip() was added. zip(seq1, seq2, ...) is equivalent to
874map(None, seq1, seq2, ...) when the sequences have the same length;
875i.e. zip([1,2,3], [10,20,30]) returns [(1,10), (2,20), (3,30)]. When
876the lists are not all the same length, the shortest list wins:
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000877zip([1,2,3], [10,20]) returns [(1,10), (2,20)]. See PEP 201.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000878
879sys.version_info is a tuple (major, minor, micro, level, serial).
880
881Dictionaries have an odd new method, setdefault(key, default).
882dict.setdefault(key, default) returns dict[key] if it exists; if not,
883it sets dict[key] to default and returns that value. Thus:
884
885 dict.setdefault(key, []).append(item)
886
887does the same work as this common idiom:
888
889 if not dict.has_key(key):
890 dict[key] = []
891 dict[key].append(item)
892
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000893There are two new variants of SyntaxError that are raised for
894indentation-related errors: IndentationError and TabError.
895
896Changed \x to consume exactly two hex digits; see PEP 223. Added \U
897escape that consumes exactly eight hex digits.
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000898
899The limits on the size of expressions and file in Python source code
900have been raised from 2**16 to 2**32. Previous versions of Python
901were limited because the maximum argument size the Python VM accepted
902was 2**16. This limited the size of object constructor expressions,
903e.g. [1,2,3] or {'a':1, 'b':2}, and the size of source files. This
904limit was raised thanks to a patch by Charles Waldman that effectively
905fixes the problem. It is now much more likely that you will be
906limited by available memory than by an arbitrary limit in Python.
907
908The interpreter's maximum recursion depth can be modified by Python
909programs using sys.getrecursionlimit and sys.setrecursionlimit. This
910limit is the maximum number of recursive calls that can be made by
911Python code. The limit exists to prevent infinite recursion from
912overflowing the C stack and causing a core dump. The default value is
9131000. The maximum safe value for a particular platform can be found
914by running Misc/find_recursionlimit.py.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +0000915
916New Modules and Packages
917------------------------
918
919atexit - for registering functions to be called when Python exits.
920
921imputil - Greg Stein's alternative API for writing custom import
922hooks.
923
924pyexpat - an interface to the Expat XML parser, contributed by Paul
925Prescod.
926
927xml - a new package with XML support code organized (so far) in three
928subpackages: xml.dom, xml.sax, and xml.parsers. Describing these
929would fill a volume. There's a special feature whereby a
930user-installed package named _xmlplus overrides the standard
931xmlpackage; this is intended to give the XML SIG a hook to distribute
932backwards-compatible updates to the standard xml package.
933
934webbrowser - a platform-independent API to launch a web browser.
935
936
Guido van Rossume905e952000-09-05 12:42:46 +0000937Changed Modules
938---------------
939
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000940array -- new methods for array objects: count, extend, index, pop, and
941remove
942
943binascii -- new functions b2a_hex and a2b_hex that convert between
944binary data and its hex representation
945
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000946calendar -- Many new functions that support features including control
947over which day of the week is the first day, returning strings instead
948of printing them. Also new symbolic constants for days of week,
949e.g. MONDAY, ..., SUNDAY.
950
951cgi -- FieldStorage objects have a getvalue method that works like a
952dictionary's get method and returns the value attribute of the object.
953
954ConfigParser -- The parser object has new methods has_option,
955remove_section, remove_option, set, and write. They allow the module
956to be used for writing config files as well as reading them.
957
958ftplib -- ntransfercmd(), transfercmd(), and retrbinary() all now
Guido van Rossume905e952000-09-05 12:42:46 +0000959optionally support the RFC 959 REST command.
960
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000961gzip -- readline and readlines now accept optional size arguments
Guido van Rossume905e952000-09-05 12:42:46 +0000962
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000963httplib -- New interfaces and support for HTTP/1.1 by Greg Stein. See
964the module doc strings for details.
Guido van Rossum830ca2a2000-09-05 15:34:16 +0000965
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000966locale -- implement getdefaultlocale for Win32 and Macintosh
967
968marshal -- no longer dumps core when marshaling deeply nested or
969recursive data structures
970
971os -- new functions isatty, seteuid, setegid, setreuid, setregid
972
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000973os/popen2 -- popen2/popen3/popen4 support under Windows. popen2/popen3
974support under Unix.
975
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000976os/pty -- support for openpty and forkpty
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000977
978os.path -- fix semantics of os.path.commonprefix
979
980smtplib -- support for sending very long messages
981
982socket -- new function getfqdn()
983
984readline -- new functions to read, write and truncate history files.
985The readline section of the library reference manual contains an
986example.
987
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000988select -- add interface to poll system call
989
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000990shutil -- new copyfileobj function
991
992SimpleHTTPServer, CGIHTTPServer -- Fix problems with buffering in the
993HTTP server.
994
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +0000995Tkinter -- optimization of function flatten
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000996
997urllib -- scans environment variables for proxy configuration,
Tim Peters8b092332000-09-05 20:15:25 +0000998e.g. http_proxy.
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +0000999
1000whichdb -- recognizes dumbdbm format
Guido van Rossume905e952000-09-05 12:42:46 +00001001
1002
1003Obsolete Modules
1004----------------
1005
1006None. However note that 1.6 made a whole slew of modules obsolete:
1007stdwin, soundex, cml, cmpcache, dircache, dump, find, grep, packmail,
1008poly, zmod, strop, util, whatsound.
1009
1010
1011Changed, New, Obsolete Tools
1012----------------------------
1013
Tim Peters8b092332000-09-05 20:15:25 +00001014None.
Guido van Rossume905e952000-09-05 12:42:46 +00001015
1016
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00001017C-level Changes
1018---------------
1019
1020Several cleanup jobs were carried out throughout the source code.
1021
1022All C code was converted to ANSI C; we got rid of all uses of the
1023Py_PROTO() macro, which makes the header files a lot more readable.
1024
1025Most of the portability hacks were moved to a new header file,
1026pyport.h; several other new header files were added and some old
1027header files were removed, in an attempt to create a more rational set
1028of header files. (Few of these ever need to be included explicitly;
1029they are all included by Python.h.)
1030
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00001031Trent Mick ensured portability to 64-bit platforms, under both Linux
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00001032and Win64, especially for the new Intel Itanium processor. Mick also
1033added large file support for Linux64 and Win64.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00001034
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00001035The C APIs to return an object's size have been update to consistently
1036use the form PyXXX_Size, e.g. PySequence_Size and PyDict_Size. In
1037previous versions, the abstract interfaces used PyXXX_Length and the
1038concrete interfaces used PyXXX_Size. The old names,
1039e.g. PyObject_Length, are still available for backwards compatibility
1040at the API level, but are deprecated.
1041
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00001042The PyOS_CheckStack function has been implemented on Windows by
1043Fredrik Lundh. It prevents Python from failing with a stack overflow
1044on Windows.
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00001045
1046The GC changes resulted in creation of two new slots on object,
1047tp_traverse and tp_clear. The augmented assignment changes result in
Guido van Rossum4338a282000-09-06 13:02:08 +00001048the creation of a new slot for each in-place operator.
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00001049
1050The GC API creates new requirements for container types implemented in
Guido van Rossum4338a282000-09-06 13:02:08 +00001051C extension modules. See Include/objimpl.h for details.
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00001052
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00001053PyErr_Format has been updated to automatically calculate the size of
1054the buffer needed to hold the formatted result string. This change
1055prevents crashes caused by programmer error.
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00001056
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00001057New C API calls: PyObject_AsFileDescriptor, PyErr_WriteUnraisable.
Guido van Rossume905e952000-09-05 12:42:46 +00001058
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00001059PyRun_AnyFileEx, PyRun_SimpleFileEx, PyRun_FileEx -- New functions
1060that are the same as their non-Ex counterparts except they take an
1061extra flag argument that tells them to close the file when done.
1062
1063XXX There were other API changes that should be fleshed out here.
Guido van Rossumab9d6f01998-08-10 22:01:13 +00001064
Tim Peters8b092332000-09-05 20:15:25 +00001065
1066Windows Changes
1067---------------
1068
1069New popen2/popen3/peopen4 in os module (see Changed Modules above).
1070
1071os.popen is much more usable on Windows 95 and 98. See Microsoft
1072Knowledge Base article Q150956. The Win9x workaround described there
1073is implemented by the new w9xpopen.exe helper in the root of your
1074Python installation. Note that Python uses this internally; it is not
1075a standalone program.
1076
1077Administrator privileges are no longer required to install Python
1078on Windows NT or Windows 2000. If you have administrator privileges,
1079Python's registry info will be written under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.
1080Otherwise the installer backs off to writing Python's registry info
Guido van Rossum4338a282000-09-06 13:02:08 +00001081under HKEY_CURRENT_USER. The latter is sufficient for all "normal"
Tim Peters8b092332000-09-05 20:15:25 +00001082uses of Python, but will prevent some advanced uses from working
1083(for example, running a Python script as an NT service, or possibly
1084from CGI).
1085
1086[This was new in 1.6] The installer no longer runs a separate Tcl/Tk
1087installer; instead, it installs the needed Tcl/Tk files directly in the
1088Python directory. If you already have a Tcl/Tk installation, this
1089wastes some disk space (about 4 Megs) but avoids problems with
1090conflicting Tcl/Tk installations, and makes it much easier for Python
1091to ensure that Tcl/Tk can find all its files.
1092
1093[This was new in 1.6] The Windows installer now installs by default in
1094\Python20\ on the default volume, instead of \Program Files\Python-2.0\.
1095
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00001096
1097Updates to the changes between 1.5.2 and 1.6
1098--------------------------------------------
1099
1100The 1.6 NEWS file can't be changed after the release is done, so here
1101is some late-breaking news:
1102
1103New APIs in locale.py: normalize(), getdefaultlocale(), resetlocale(),
1104and changes to getlocale() and setlocale().
1105
1106The new module is now enabled per default.
1107
1108It is not true that the encodings codecs cannot be used for normal
1109strings: the string.encode() (which is also present on 8-bit strings
1110!) allows using them for 8-bit strings too, e.g. to convert files from
1111cp1252 (Windows) to latin-1 or vice-versa.
1112
1113Japanese codecs are available from Tamito KAJIYAMA:
1114http://pseudo.grad.sccs.chukyo-u.ac.jp/~kajiyama/python/
1115
1116
Guido van Rossumab9d6f01998-08-10 22:01:13 +00001117======================================================================