+++++++++++ Python News +++++++++++ (editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.) What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1? ================================= *Release date: 31-Dec-2002* Type/class unification and new-style classes -------------------------------------------- - One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes. - dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2) is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly, the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has a different meaning than before. - int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the integer range, so int("4"*1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError. - Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool. - New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation and deallocation. - The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]). - The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in names but are accessible through the types module, are now also callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy. - Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are now detected by the garbage collector. - Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected. [SF bug 519621] - Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python identifier. - The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did. [SF bug 563060] - A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string": isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly. - Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__ method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is not called. [SF bug #537450] - Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444] - If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised. This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the state of the slots would be lost.) Core and builtins ----------------- - Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since Jython 2.1. - PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was inititally developed to support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism. Several new variables have been added to the sys module: sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these make extending the import statement much more convenient than overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of these, see PEP 302. - A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835] - The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263. - issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``. - Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language. The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations, and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across releases or implementations. - Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented. All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute, which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere. - Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented. Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized. - A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern(): interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference to the return value intern() around to get the benefit. - Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword. - SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up to date when there is a trace function set). - There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that PEP. The warnings are about the following situations: - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit pattern. - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be precise: x< -*-" in the first or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding. - list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation, and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too), although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function does not. See for full details. - All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce this.) - Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught, and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.) [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232] - sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows currently running. - Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time, but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count was one or when the slice range was all inclusive. - Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated as directory names. - Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951] - Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the finally clause. [SF bug 567538] - Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1] gives "dlrow olleh". - A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated. The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning:: as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code. - Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist() method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been removed. - New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example: enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c"). The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object. - The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value to __debug__. - A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric string to the left with zeros. For example, "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123". - Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being deprecated now. - String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo". - There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing duplicates from sequences. - Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949] - A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry other operations that return a truth value have been changed to return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this is backward compatible. - Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions, deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code; access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable could access a pointer to freed memory. - The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included, Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2 onwards. - PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors. - The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones. - Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U' instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to '\n', the standard Python line end character. - file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed: Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called. - sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument. An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used. - Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will evaluate f1 first. - Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read() could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error. - The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots. This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807). Extension modules ----------------- - posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx. - A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip archives. - The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage - _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method, or Tkinter.wantobjects. - The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore, and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from 3.0 to 4.1. - unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs. - resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints. - readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if sys.stdin/stdout changes. - The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are supported. - cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class. - The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers after stat_float_times has been called. - If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792] - The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence. - The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it). - The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer functions but callable type objects. - The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename. This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be written to disk. - posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and posix.getpgid have been added where available. - The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It also has a new function getpreferredencoding. - A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular third party compression library used by some Python modules. The hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4. - pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic field names. - array.array is now a type object. A new format character 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__ and __imul__. - dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open is called. - signal.sigpending, signal.sigprocmask and signal.sigsuspend have been added where available. - The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the interpreter was compiled. - Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab') when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example, when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be 1, not 2. - Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer limit. - The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes bug #623464. Library ------- - Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library; slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow with Python 2.3a2. - os.path exposes getctime. - unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual() and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparision by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing the result to zero. Approximate comparision is essential for unit tests of floating point results. - calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates has been increased. - pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be executed. - The distutils created windows installers now can run a postinstallation script. - doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to test the current module. - When cancelling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that this behavior needs to be controlled. - A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg Ward's Optik package. - UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface. This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable for dictionaries (such as the shelve module). - shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind. - shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the shelf are binary pickles. - A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip. - StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs modules are iterators now. - gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file size. - xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references with their entity value. - Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument. - Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s. - Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a dictionary when invoked with no argument. - Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's main(): import locale locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "") - shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an exception at the end, instead of printing error messages. - Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated to the new standard. - mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and an extension to the database. - New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which is the base class of the two. - Added operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to a**b. - Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement. Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population. - random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start' and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's bounded integers. - Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C, threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator in existence. The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead() continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward. The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward compatibility and to make an alternate generator available. - New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps. - New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos. - binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs, crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform. - xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding argument. - Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type' [SF patch 560794]. - Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function, socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets created henceforth. - getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments. - Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error, tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error. - Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE, BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2. - Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians(). - math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]). - ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not identical to None. - random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else, and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different results now. - The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that provided by cPickle.Pickler. - difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines). - New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module. - New distutils commands for building packagers were added to support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX. - distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers. This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD and other systems. - The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error -- UTF-16 is a 2-byte encoding and the C lib's line reading APIs don't work well with these. - compileall now supports quiet operation. - The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent connections. - socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working. - encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character sets - ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host name. - webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was passed in. - gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext. - distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option. - warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument. - The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474] - The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF, or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified. - distutils' build_ext command now links c++ extensions with the c++ compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if running under *nix. - New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression functions, and types for sequential (de)compression. - New pdb command `pp' which is like `p' except that it pretty-prints the value of its expression argument. - Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file. - Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for skipstone browser was included. - Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of strings were used as parameters for certain functions. Tools/Demos ----------- - pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module names in addition to accepting file names. - The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are still used and useful.) - IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them in the locale's encoding. - freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules, unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in the generated binary. Build ----- - On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically. - The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless except in the hands of experts. - The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros are deprecated. - A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected. Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. - Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option. The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the new type. - According to Annex F of the current C standard, The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs, HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are positive infinities. Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL. pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here: http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help! - The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the size of the executable. - The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the configure script. On other platforms, remove WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h. - On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared. - All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they controlled stopped being experimental long ago. - The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as well as Unix. - The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these modules in the README file for details. C API ----- - PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects. This is a result of these types having a partially defined tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior. It may be deprecated.) - The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned strings are now usually mortal; theres a new API, PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings. (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer aligned.) - The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods' argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common now that factories can be types rather than functions. - New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C level. - New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify the exception type to raise. Available on Windows. - Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It was previously declared without const. This should not affect working code. - Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without adjusting for negative indices. - PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1. This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange object. - PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies. - The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to "``void (*)(void *)``". - PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros. - A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously, when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type, where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type. - PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does. - The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed. - The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is without going through the buffer API. - The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``. - An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless. - Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish! - Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details. New platforms ------------- - OpenVMS is now supported. - AtheOS is now supported. - the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported. - GNU/Hurd is now supported. Tests ----- - The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'. Windows ------- - The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many bugs. XXX What are the licensing issues here? XXX If a user has a database created with a previous verion of XXX Python, what must they do to convert it? XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt). XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1. - The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL) module (_ssl.pyd) - The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2). - When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under MSVC 6, sys.version constains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6. - Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in- use files" uninstall option). - Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031] - The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install. - file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values. It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used). - os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn() functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms. See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id). - New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine. However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to work around. - The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL. The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT, O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless specified with O_CREAT too). Mac ---- - Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here. - The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX. - All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build, including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including Tkinter or wxPython scripts). - Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc). - A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal window, but all this can be customized. - MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier releases. - Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command line interface too. - All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still available for convenience. - New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h) and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules. - Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames (also when running on Mac OS X). - New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager. There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer. See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a Help Viewer comaptible form and installing it. - OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes. - MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file. This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278). - The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was but "ascii", like on other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them you can change this in site.py. What's New in Python 2.2 final? =============================== *Release date: 21-Dec-2001* Type/class unification and new-style classes -------------------------------------------- - pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes with a custom metaclass. Core and builtins ----------------- - weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both are proxies. Extension modules ----------------- - binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding very short strings. - cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h). Library ------- - dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at close or delete time). - rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module). - xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles. - test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code when run from the standard regression test. Tools/Demos ----------- Build ----- C API ----- New platforms ------------- Tests ----- Windows ------- - distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst). - tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper instances are deleted at process exit time. - socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are deleted at process exit time. - posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending in backslash. Mac ---- - The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX. What's New in Python 2.2c1? =========================== *Release date: 14-Dec-2001* Type/class unification and new-style classes -------------------------------------------- - Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has been extensively updated. See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html That remains the primary documentation in this area. - Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never deleted! - The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.) - Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed: (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super). (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not supported anyway. (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an instance of the type used in creation of the super instance. - Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__). - New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further. Core and builtins ----------------- - -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all" means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in educational environments with control over the libraries in use. Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is testing the current rules). - complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string. Extension modules ----------------- - gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers. Library ------- - Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design. - webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now. - Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show. - The charset alias windows_1252 has been added. - types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types; usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled without Unicode support it will be just (str,). - The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML. Tools/Demos ----------- - A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires off a search on Google. Build ----- - Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent). In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to other platforms should do likewise. - It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python. C API ----- - New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object producing key-value pairs. - PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result, PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that previously went unchallenged. New platforms ------------- Tests ----- Windows ------- Mac ---- - In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin", without any trailing digits. - Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons. Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python home. What's New in Python 2.2b2? =========================== *Release date: 16-Nov-2001* Type/class unification and new-style classes -------------------------------------------- - Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now: class Classic: pass class Mixed(Classic, object): pass The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class. This needs to be documented. - The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage. - dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument, and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects. - New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes). - Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base class forbids it). - Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__. - The socket function has been converted to a type; see below. Core and builtins ----------------- - Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1" (see below) says. - Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator (like 1 + ''). Extension modules ----------------- - mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this! - By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes. - The socket module defines a new method for socket objects, sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.) before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing. - Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite for the curses module (you have to run it manually). - binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57 bytes on its input. Library ------- - tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory convenience function. - Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For example, the regexp r'(?P)(?P)' is not allowed, because a single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously. Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time; previously, the error went undetected, and results were unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works like findall() but returns an iterator. - Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox, DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog, tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions. - Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled). - os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS. - mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are new -l and -e options. - statcache is now deprecated. - email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings time properly taken into account. - In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__ in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle. Tools/Demos ----------- Build ----- - The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module is built with libdb3 if available. - Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement. C API ----- - New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non- NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling PySequence_Size(). - New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added. - New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C. - PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before. - New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface. New platforms ------------- - We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00, *with* threads, and passes the test suite. - Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build again under OS/2 Visual Age C++. - Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger. Tests ----- - Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically; regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it. Windows ------- Mac ---- - PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be removed completely in the next release. - It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and OSX. - The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII. - Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1 What's New in Python 2.2b1? =========================== *Release date: 19-Oct-2001* Type/class unification and new-style classes -------------------------------------------- - New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I can prove that it actually speeds things up). - C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it always returned None, even when there was a class docstring). - doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes, class methods, static methods, and properties. Core and builtins ----------------- - A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed. For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a' iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce', 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be', 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error. Note that [a for a in ] is a convoluted way to say [] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost. - getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as documented, rather than returning the default value for all exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for example). - Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API. A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a built-in exception. - unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists. unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument. - isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance() will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g. isinstance(x, (A, B)) returns true if x is an instance of A or B. Extension modules ----------------- - thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None). - binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp. - readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function. - os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence. Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as attributes. - time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with attributes like tm_year etc. - Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount of memory to use for the uncompressed data. - optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional. - posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW. Library ------- - doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg. - HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling, but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final). - profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function. The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but without losing information). - Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code. Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile module). Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overriden by subclasses. Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines. - quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter, which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q' encoding. - The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.) - The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument to allow saving the message body to a file. - The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body. Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter). - ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB. - ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO, ON, and OFF. - xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute and item() method as required by the DOM specifications. Tools/Demos ----------- - Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net. - The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have been added: -X and -E. Build ----- - configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler. C API ----- - The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return. - PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments. Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well as long) arguments. - PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only the thread module used this API). This code has only really been tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and report any bugs or strange behavior). - PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as input. New platforms ------------- Tests ----- Windows ------- - Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry is created for .py and .pyw files. - The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via signal.signal(). For example:: # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C # (SIGINT) behavior. import signal signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler) try: while 1: pass except KeyboardInterrupt: # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup). print "Clean exit" What's New in Python 2.2a4? =========================== *Release date: 28-Sep-2001* Type/class unification and new-style classes -------------------------------------------- - pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes; e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper documentation for all operations on list objects. - Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug report on SourceForge.) - property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc. These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__' in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to associate a docstring with a property. - Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most other built-in object types. - The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of a new-style class is now rendered as , *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects). - The repr() of new-style objects is now always ; previously, it was sometimes . - For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises AttributeError, __getattr__ is called. - The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to. The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old class. - The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern, "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function. file() is now the preferred way to open a file. - Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments. - Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired. - Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode), where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str with the same value as s. - Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added. Core ---- - file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings. - PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer objects. - PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must at least convert them into ASCII strings. - Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order to let other runnable threads be scheduled. Library ------- - StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods. These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such by the instances. - The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the mimelib package with API changes and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators. - difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output before the entire comparison is complete. - StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is called for each iteration until it returns an empty string). - The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(), getwriter(). - SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer) simplifies writing XML RPC servers. - os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this is an alias for os.path.abspath(). - operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any iterable object. - smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods. - hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message authentication. - mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed. - The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as a sample driver.) Tools ----- Build ----- - Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose kernel has large file support. - The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN). - The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py. C API ----- - The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode. New platforms ------------- - Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution (http://familiar.handhelds.org). Tests ----- - The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences. This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting. - The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main() convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework. - regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now, especially in regard to reporting errors. Windows ------- - Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in Python 2.2a3" for more detail. What's New in Python 2.2a3? =========================== *Release Date: 07-Sep-2001* Core ---- - Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too big to represent as a C double. - The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same restriction). - The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned an empty list. In 2.2a3, >>> dir([]) ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__', '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__', '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__', '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__', '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__', 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove', 'reverse', 'sort'] dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though. - Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old OverflowError exception. - A new command line option, -Q, is added to control run-time warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments (for use with fixdiv.py). [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] :: Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and warns about classic division everywhere else. - Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int, long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.) Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value" (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance once it is created. - The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its (key, value) pairs. - A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation - A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__. See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property - The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now legal that were SyntaxErrors before: 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008. - An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError. Library ------- - telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing of suboptions. - The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow- checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable in this area anymore). - Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class threading.Timer. - math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0. - A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is currently held. See the docs for the imp module. - pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes. When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are converted to Python longs. - In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole. - unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references to objects that should be garbage collected between tests. Tools ----- - Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix division operators as per PEP 238. Build ----- - If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa. Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please. C API ----- - New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj). - Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check:: double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object); if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) { /* The conversion failed. */ } - The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension module: - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini to PyObject_GC_UnTrack - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC - Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV(). These can be used safely to construct string objects from a sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported by PyErr_Format()). New platforms ------------- - Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and causing later failures too. Tests ----- Windows ------- - Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek() to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte) filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there. FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now. NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be used from Python now. - The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan). What's New in Python 2.2a2? =========================== *Release Date: 22-Aug-2001* Build ----- - Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1, generously donated to us by Wise Solutions. - configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter. - A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework, which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org if you are interested in helping. - The NeXT platform is no longer supported. - The 'new' module is now statically linked. Tools ----- - The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See the module docstring for details. Tests ----- - regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests which require network access or consume significant disk resources. - Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to Nick Mathewson. Core ---- - The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion: - Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full details: . - The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to come a long way). - Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to write filters for these warnings). - A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None, but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None. - A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an older distribution. Library ------- - New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py. These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py, for programmatic reuse. - New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values. - Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added. - Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings. - Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore() - Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module. - The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags. - The gc module offers the get_referents function. New platforms ------------- C API ----- - Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added which provide a cross-platform implementations for the relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection against buffer overruns. - Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension. - Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now deprecated. Windows ------- - "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else relevant is found. What's New in Python 2.2a1? =========================== *Release date: 18-Jul-2001* Core ---- - TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be repaired. - Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236). Generators will become a standard feature in a future release (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used. (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.) - The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a leading BMO character). - Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs. To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding). Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1") will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs for various simple to use conversions. New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode() and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects): +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+ |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description | +=========+===========+===========+=============================+ |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) | +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+ |base64 | string | string | base64 codec | +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+ |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec | +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+ |zlib | string | string | zlib compression | +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+ |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec | +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+ |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec| +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+ - Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs' as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than 'mbcs'. On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than the default encoding for the file system. In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect, increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context. See [????] for more details, including examples. - Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754 floating arithmetic, x = 9007199254740992.0 print long(x) printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion functions are of good quality). This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable algorithms to break. - The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(), dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted order. - Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster operation along the most common code paths. - Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means the same as dict.has_key(x). - The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys() and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example, {}.update(UserDict()) - Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter() to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C). Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys. Iterating over a file generates its lines. - The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator arguments:: map(), filter(), reduce(), zip() list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API) max(), min() join() method of strings extend() method of lists 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API) operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API) right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as :: x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values - Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example, random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute). - Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==. - Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down. - Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never). - repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple). Library ------- - The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase were added to the string module. These a locale-independent constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now use in appropriate locations in the standard library. - The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags. - Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition, Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based, one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation. - The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing, repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist() method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260. - A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added. - calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale. - strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6), and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items that are still imported into string.py). - Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings. - pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects. Now it does. - pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict). - New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types. In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are 8-byte integral types. - The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help', it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or 'help(object)'. Tests ----- - New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!). - New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple cases produce correct output. C API ----- - Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating. ---- **(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**