What's New in Python 2.1 alpha 2? ================================= Core language, builtins, and interpreter - Scopes nest. If a name is used in a function or class, but is not local, the definition in the nearest enclosing function scope will be used. One consequence of this change is that lambda statements could reference variables in the namespaces where the lambda is defined. In some unusual cases, this change will break code. In all previous version of Python, names were resolved in exactly three namespaces -- the local namespace, the global namespace, and the builtin namespace. According to this old definition, if a function A is defined within a function B, the names bound in B are not visible in A. The new rules make names bound in B visible in A, unless A contains a name binding that hides the binding in B. Section 4.1 of the reference manual describes the new scoping rules in detail. The test script in Lib/test/test_scope.py demonstrates some of the effects of the change. The new rules will cause existing code to break if it defines nested functions where an outer function has local variables with the same name as globals or builtins used by the inner function. Example: def munge(str): def helper(x): return str(x) if type(str) != type(''): str = helper(str) return str.strip() Under the old rules, the name str in helper() is bound to the builtin function str(). Under the new rules, it will be bound to the argument named str and an error will occur when helper() is called. - The compiler will report a SyntaxError if "from ... import *" occurs in a function or class scope. The language reference has documented that this case is illegal, but the compiler never checked for it. The recent introduction of nested scope makes the meaning of this form of name binding ambiguous. In a future release, the compiler may allow this form when there is no possibility of ambiguity. - repr(string) is easier to read, now using hex escapes instead of octal, and using \t, \n and \r instead of \011, \012 and \015 (respectively): >>> "\texample \r\n" + chr(0) + chr(255) '\texample \r\n\x00\xff' # in 2.1 '\011example \015\012\000\377' # in 2.0 - Functions are now compared and hashed by identity, not by value, since the func_code attribute is writable. - Weak references (PEP 205) have been added. This involves a few changes in the core, an extension module (_weakref), and a Python module (weakref). The weakref module is the public interface. It includes support for "explicit" weak references, proxy objects, and mappings with weakly held values. - A 'continue' statement can now appear in a try block within the body of a loop. It is still not possible to use continue in a finally clause. Standard library - mailbox.py now has a new class, PortableUnixMailbox which is identical to UnixMailbox but uses a more portable scheme for determining From_ separators. Also, the constructors for all the classes in this module have a new optional `factory' argument, which is a callable used when new message classes must be instantiated by the next() method. - random.py is now self-contained, and offers all the functionality of the now-deprecated whrandom.py. See the docs for details. random.py also supports new functions getstate() and setstate(), for saving and restoring the internal state of the generator; and jumpahead(n), for quickly forcing the internal state to be the same as if n calls to random() had been made. The latter is particularly useful for multi- threaded programs, creating one instance of the random.Random() class for each thread, then using .jumpahead() to force each instance to use a non-overlapping segment of the full period. - random.py's seed() function is new. For bit-for-bit compatibility with prior releases, use the whseed function instead. The new seed function addresses two problems: (1) The old function couldn't produce more than about 2**24 distinct internal states; the new one about 2**45 (the best that can be done in the Wichmann-Hill generator). (2) The old function sometimes produced identical internal states when passed distinct integers, and there was no simple way to predict when that would happen; the new one guarantees to produce distinct internal states for all arguments in [0, 27814431486576L). - The socket module now supports raw packets on Linux. The socket family is AF_PACKET. - test_capi.py is a start at running tests of the Python C API. The tests are implemented by the new Modules/_testmodule.c. - A new extension module, _symtable, provides provisional access to the internal symbol table used by the Python compiler. A higher-level interface will be added on top of _symtable in a future release. Windows changes - Build procedure: the zlib project is built in a different way that ensures the zlib header files used can no longer get out of synch with the zlib binary used. See PCbuild\readme.txt for details. Your old zlib-related directories can be deleted; you'll need to download fresh source for zlib and unpack it into a new directory. - Build: New subproject _test for the benefit of test_capi.py (see above). - Build: New subproject _symtable, for new DLL _symtable.pyd (a nascent interface to some Python compiler internals). - Build: Subproject ucnhash is gone, since the code was folded into the unicodedata subproject. What's New in Python 2.1 alpha 1? ================================= Core language, builtins, and interpreter - There is a new Unicode companion to the PyObject_Str() API called PyObject_Unicode(). It behaves in the same way as the former, but assures that the returned value is an Unicode object (applying the usual coercion if necessary). - The comparison operators support "rich comparison overloading" (PEP 207). C extension types can provide a rich comparison function in the new tp_richcompare slot in the type object. The cmp() function and the C function PyObject_Compare() first try the new rich comparison operators before trying the old 3-way comparison. There is also a new C API PyObject_RichCompare() (which also falls back on the old 3-way comparison, but does not constrain the outcome of the rich comparison to a Boolean result). The rich comparison function takes two objects (at least one of which is guaranteed to have the type that provided the function) and an integer indicating the opcode, which can be Py_LT, Py_LE, Py_EQ, Py_NE, Py_GT, Py_GE (for <, <=, ==, !=, >, >=), and returns a Python object, which may be NotImplemented (in which case the tp_compare slot function is used as a fallback, if defined). Classes can overload individual comparison operators by defining one or more of the methods__lt__, __le__, __eq__, __ne__, __gt__, __ge__. There are no explicit "reflected argument" versions of these; instead, __lt__ and __gt__ are each other's reflection, likewise for__le__ and __ge__; __eq__ and __ne__ are their own reflection (similar at the C level). No other implications are made; in particular, Python does not assume that == is the Boolean inverse of !=, or that < is the Boolean inverse of >=. This makes it possible to define types with partial orderings. Classes or types that want to implement (in)equality tests but not the ordering operators (i.e. unordered types) should implement == and !=, and raise an error for the ordering operators. It is possible to define types whose rich comparison results are not Boolean; e.g. a matrix type might want to return a matrix of bits for A < B, giving elementwise comparisons. Such types should ensure that any interpretation of their value in a Boolean context raises an exception, e.g. by defining __nonzero__ (or the tp_nonzero slot at the C level) to always raise an exception. - Complex numbers use rich comparisons to define == and != but raise an exception for <, <=, > and >=. Unfortunately, this also means that cmp() of two complex numbers raises an exception when the two numbers differ. Since it is not mathematically meaningful to compare complex numbers except for equality, I hope that this doesn't break too much code. - Functions and methods now support getting and setting arbitrarily named attributes (PEP 232). Functions have a new __dict__ (a.k.a. func_dict) which hold the function attributes. Methods get and set attributes on their underlying im_func. It is a TypeError to set an attribute on a bound method. - The xrange() object implementation has been improved so that xrange(sys.maxint) can be used on 64-bit platforms. There's still a limitation that in this case len(xrange(sys.maxint)) can't be calculated, but the common idiom "for i in xrange(sys.maxint)" will work fine as long as the index i doesn't actually reach 2**31. (Python uses regular ints for sequence and string indices; fixing that is much more work.) - Two changes to from...import: 1) "from M import X" now works even if M is not a real module; it's basically a getattr() operation with AttributeError exceptions changed into ImportError. 2) "from M import *" now looks for M.__all__ to decide which names to import; if M.__all__ doesn't exist, it uses M.__dict__.keys() but filters out names starting with '_' as before. Whether or not __all__ exists, there's no restriction on the type of M. - File objects have a new method, xreadlines(). This is the fastest way to iterate over all lines in a file: for line in file.xreadlines(): ...do something to line... See the xreadlines module (mentioned below) for how to do this for other file-like objects. - Even if you don't use file.xreadlines(), you may expect a speedup on line-by-line input. The file.readline() method has been optimized quite a bit in platform-specific ways: on systems (like Linux) that support flockfile(), getc_unlocked(), and funlockfile(), those are used by default. On systems (like Windows) without getc_unlocked(), a complicated (but still thread-safe) method using fgets() is used by default. You can force use of the fgets() method by #define'ing USE_FGETS_IN_GETLINE at build time (it may be faster than getc_unlocked()). You can force fgets() not to be used by #define'ing DONT_USE_FGETS_IN_GETLINE (this is the first thing to try if std test test_bufio.py fails -- and let us know if it does!). - In addition, the fileinput module, while still slower than the other methods on most platforms, has been sped up too, by using file.readlines(sizehint). - Support for run-time warnings has been added, including a new command line option (-W) to specify the disposition of warnings. See the description of the warnings module below. - Extensive changes have been made to the coercion code. This mostly affects extension modules (which can now implement mixed-type numerical operators without having to use coercion), but occasionally, in boundary cases the coercion semantics have changed subtly. Since this was a terrible gray area of the language, this is considered an improvement. Also note that __rcmp__ is no longer supported -- instead of calling __rcmp__, __cmp__ is called with reflected arguments. - In connection with the coercion changes, a new built-in singleton object, NotImplemented is defined. This can be returned for operations that wish to indicate they are not implemented for a particular combination of arguments. From C, this is Py_NotImplemented. - The interpreter accepts now bytecode files on the command line even if they do not have a .pyc or .pyo extension. On Linux, after executing echo ':pyc:M::\x87\xc6\x0d\x0a::/usr/local/bin/python:' > /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register any byte code file can be used as an executable (i.e. as an argument to execve(2)). - %[xXo] formats of negative Python longs now produce a sign character. In 1.6 and earlier, they never produced a sign, and raised an error if the value of the long was too large to fit in a Python int. In 2.0, they produced a sign if and only if too large to fit in an int. This was inconsistent across platforms (because the size of an int varies across platforms), and inconsistent with hex() and oct(). Example: >>> "%x" % -0x42L '-42' # in 2.1 'ffffffbe' # in 2.0 and before, on 32-bit machines >>> hex(-0x42L) '-0x42L' # in all versions of Python The behavior of %d formats for negative Python longs remains the same as in 2.0 (although in 1.6 and before, they raised an error if the long didn't fit in a Python int). %u formats don't make sense for Python longs, but are allowed and treated the same as %d in 2.1. In 2.0, a negative long formatted via %u produced a sign if and only if too large to fit in an int. In 1.6 and earlier, a negative long formatted via %u raised an error if it was too big to fit in an int. - Dictionary objects have an odd new method, popitem(). This removes an arbitrary item from the dictionary and returns it (in the form of a (key, value) pair). This can be useful for algorithms that use a dictionary as a bag of "to do" items and repeatedly need to pick one item. Such algorithms normally end up running in quadratic time; using popitem() they can usually be made to run in linear time. Standard library - In the time module, the time argument to the functions strftime, localtime, gmtime, asctime and ctime is now optional, defaulting to the current time (in the local timezone). - The ftplib module now defaults to passive mode, which is deemed a more useful default given that clients are often inside firewalls these days. Note that this could break if ftplib is used to connect to a *server* that is inside a firewall, from outside; this is expected to be a very rare situation. To fix that, you can call ftp.set_pasv(0). - The module site now treats .pth files not only for path configuration, but also supports extensions to the initialization code: Lines starting with import are executed. - There's a new module, warnings, which implements a mechanism for issuing and filtering warnings. There are some new built-in exceptions that serve as warning categories, and a new command line option, -W, to control warnings (e.g. -Wi ignores all warnings, -We turns warnings into errors). warnings.warn(message[, category]) issues a warning message; this can also be called from C as PyErr_Warn(category, message). - A new module xreadlines was added. This exports a single factory function, xreadlines(). The intention is that this code is the absolutely fastest way to iterate over all lines in an open file(-like) object: import xreadlines for line in xreadlines.xreadlines(file): ...do something to line... This is equivalent to the previous the speed record holder using file.readlines(sizehint). Note that if file is a real file object (as opposed to a file-like object), this is equivalent: for line in file.xreadlines(): ...do something to line... - The bisect module has new functions bisect_left, insort_left, bisect_right and insort_right. The old names bisect and insort are now aliases for bisect_right and insort_right. XXX_right and XXX_left methods differ in what happens when the new element compares equal to one or more elements already in the list: the XXX_left methods insert to the left, the XXX_right methods to the right. Code that doesn't care where equal elements end up should continue to use the old, short names ("bisect" and "insort"). - The new curses.panel module wraps the panel library that forms part of SYSV curses and ncurses. Contributed by Thomas Gellekum. - The SocketServer module now sets the allow_reuse_address flag by default in the TCPServer class. - A new function, sys._getframe(), returns the stack frame pointer of the caller. This is intended only as a building block for higher-level mechanisms such as string interpolation. Build issues - For Unix (and Unix-compatible) builds, configuration and building of extension modules is now greatly automated. Rather than having to edit the Modules/Setup file to indicate which modules should be built and where their include files and libraries are, a distutils-based setup.py script now takes care of building most extension modules. All extension modules built this way are built as shared libraries. Only a few modules that must be linked statically are still listed in the Setup file; you won't need to edit their configuration. - Python should now build out of the box on Cygwin. If it doesn't, mail to Jason Tishler (jlt63 at users.sourceforge.net). - Python now always uses its own (renamed) implementation of getopt() -- there's too much variation among C library getopt() implementations. - C++ compilers are better supported; the CXX macro is always set to a C++ compiler if one is found. Windows changes - select module: By default under Windows, a select() call can specify no more than 64 sockets. Python now boosts this Microsoft default to 512. If you need even more than that, see the MS docs (you'll need to #define FD_SETSIZE and recompile Python from source). - Support for Windows 3.1, DOS and OS/2 is gone. The Lib/dos-8x3 subdirectory is no more! What's New in Python 2.0? ========================= Below is a list of all relevant changes since release 1.6. Older changes are in the file HISTORY. If you are making the jump directly from Python 1.5.2 to 2.0, make sure to read the section for 1.6 in the HISTORY file! Many important changes listed there. Alternatively, a good overview of the changes between 1.5.2 and 2.0 is the document "What's New in Python 2.0" by Kuchling and Moshe Zadka: http://starship.python.net/crew/amk/python/writing/new-python/. --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.pythonlabs.com/~guido/) ====================================================================== What's new in 2.0 (since release candidate 1)? ============================================== Standard library - The copy_reg module was modified to clarify its intended use: to register pickle support for extension types, not for classes. pickle() will raise a TypeError if it is passed a class. - Fixed a bug in gettext's "normalize and expand" code that prevented it from finding an existing .mo file. - Restored support for HTTP/0.9 servers in httplib. - The math module was changed to stop raising OverflowError in case of underflow, and return 0 instead in underflow cases. Whether Python used to raise OverflowError in case of underflow was platform- dependent (it did when the platform math library set errno to ERANGE on underflow). - Fixed a bug in StringIO that occurred when the file position was not at the end of the file and write() was called with enough data to extend past the end of the file. - Fixed a bug that caused Tkinter error messages to get lost on Windows. The bug was fixed by replacing direct use of interp->result with Tcl_GetStringResult(interp). - Fixed bug in urllib2 that caused it to fail when it received an HTTP redirect response. - Several changes were made to distutils: Some debugging code was removed from util. Fixed the installer used when an external zip program (like WinZip) is not found; the source code for this installer is in Misc/distutils. check_lib() was modified to behave more like AC_CHECK_LIB by add other_libraries() as a parameter. The test for whether installed modules are on sys.path was changed to use both normcase() and normpath(). - Several minor bugs were fixed in the xml package (the minidom, pulldom, expatreader, and saxutils modules). - The regression test driver (regrtest.py) behavior when invoked with -l changed: It now reports a count of objects that are recognized as garbage but not freed by the garbage collector. - The regression test for the math module was changed to test exceptional behavior when the test is run in verbose mode. Python cannot yet guarantee consistent exception behavior across platforms, so the exception part of test_math is run only in verbose mode, and may fail on your platform. Internals - PyOS_CheckStack() has been disabled on Win64, where it caused test_sre to fail. Build issues - Changed compiler flags, so that gcc is always invoked with -Wall and -Wstrict-prototypes. Users compiling Python with GCC should see exactly one warning, except if they have passed configure the --with-pydebug flag. The expected warning is for getopt() in Modules/main.c. This warning will be fixed for Python 2.1. - Fixed configure to add -threads argument during linking on OSF1. Tools and other miscellany - The compiler in Tools/compiler was updated to support the new language features introduced in 2.0: extended print statement, list comprehensions, and augmented assignments. The new compiler should also be backwards compatible with Python 1.5.2; the compiler will always generate code for the version of the interpreter it runs under. What's new in 2.0 release candidate 1 (since beta 2)? ===================================================== What is release candidate 1? We believe that release candidate 1 will fix all known bugs that we intend to fix for the 2.0 final release. This release should be a bit more stable than the previous betas. We would like to see even more widespread testing before the final release, so we are producing this release candidate. The final release will be exactly the same unless any show-stopping (or brown bag) bugs are found by testers of the release candidate. All the changes since the last beta release are bug fixes or changes to support building Python for specific platforms. Core language, builtins, and interpreter - A bug that caused crashes when __coerce__ was used with augmented assignment, e.g. +=, was fixed. - Raise ZeroDivisionError when raising zero to a negative number, e.g. 0.0 ** -2.0. Note that math.pow is unrelated to the builtin power operator and the result of math.pow(0.0, -2.0) will vary by platform. On Linux, it raises a ValueError. - A bug in Unicode string interpolation was fixed that occasionally caused errors with formats including "%%". For example, the following expression "%% %s" % u"abc" no longer raises a TypeError. - Compilation of deeply nested expressions raises MemoryError instead of SyntaxError, e.g. eval("[" * 50 + "]" * 50). - In 2.0b2 on Windows, the interpreter wrote .pyc files in text mode, rendering them useless. They are now written in binary mode again. Standard library - Keyword arguments are now accepted for most pattern and match object methods in SRE, the standard regular expression engine. - In SRE, fixed error with negative lookahead and lookbehind that manifested itself as a runtime error in patterns like "(? is now included by Python.h (if it exists). INT_MAX and LONG_MAX will always be defined, even if is not available. - PyFloat_FromString takes a second argument, pend, that was effectively useless. It is now officially useless but preserved for backwards compatibility. If the pend argument is not NULL, *pend is set to NULL. - PyObject_GetAttr() and PyObject_SetAttr() now accept Unicode objects for the attribute name. See note on getattr() above. - A few bug fixes to argument processing for Unicode. PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() now accepts "es#" and "es". PyArg_Parse() special cases "s#" for Unicode objects; it returns a pointer to the default encoded string data instead of to the raw UTF-16. - Py_BuildValue accepts B format (for bgen-generated code). Internals - On Unix, fix code for finding Python installation directory so that it works when argv[0] is a relative path. - Added a true unicode_internal_encode() function and fixed the unicode_internal_decode function() to support Unicode objects directly rather than by generating a copy of the object. - Several of the internal Unicode tables are much smaller now, and the source code should be much friendlier to weaker compilers. - In the garbage collector: Fixed bug in collection of tuples. Fixed bug that caused some instances to be removed from the container set while they were still live. Fixed parsing in gc.set_debug() for platforms where sizeof(long) > sizeof(int). - Fixed refcount problem in instance deallocation that only occurred when Py_REF_DEBUG was defined and Py_TRACE_REFS was not. - On Windows, getpythonregpath is now protected against null data in registry key. - On Unix, create .pyc/.pyo files with O_EXCL flag to avoid a race condition. Build and platform-specific issues - Better support of GNU Pth via --with-pth configure option. - Python/C API now properly exposed to dynamically-loaded extension modules on Reliant UNIX. - Changes for the benefit of SunOS 4.1.4 (really!). mmapmodule.c: Don't define MS_SYNC to be zero when it is undefined. Added missing prototypes in posixmodule.c. - Improved support for HP-UX build. Threads should now be correctly configured (on HP-UX 10.20 and 11.00). - Fix largefile support on older NetBSD systems and OpenBSD by adding define for TELL64. Tools and other miscellany - ftpmirror: Call to main() is wrapped in if __name__ == "__main__". - freeze: The modulefinder now works with 2.0 opcodes. - IDLE: Move hackery of sys.argv until after the Tk instance has been created, which allows the application-specific Tkinter initialization to be executed if present; also pass an explicit className parameter to the Tk() constructor. What's new in 2.0 beta 1? ========================= Source Incompatibilities ------------------------ None. Note that 1.6 introduced several incompatibilities with 1.5.2, such as single-argument append(), connect() and bind(), and changes to str(long) and repr(float). Binary Incompatibilities ------------------------ - Third party extensions built for Python 1.5.x or 1.6 cannot be used with Python 2.0; these extensions will have to be rebuilt for Python 2.0. - On Windows, attempting to import a third party extension built for Python 1.5.x or 1.6 results in an immediate crash; there's not much we can do about this. Check your PYTHONPATH environment variable! - Python bytecode files (*.pyc and *.pyo) are not compatible between releases. Overview of Changes Since 1.6 ----------------------------- There are many new modules (including brand new XML support through the xml package, and i18n support through the gettext module); a list of all new modules is included below. Lots of bugs have been fixed. The process for making major new changes to the language has changed since Python 1.6. Enhancements must now be documented by a Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) before they can be accepted. There are several important syntax enhancements, described in more detail below: - Augmented assignment, e.g. x += 1 - List comprehensions, e.g. [x**2 for x in range(10)] - Extended import statement, e.g. import Module as Name - Extended print statement, e.g. print >> file, "Hello" Other important changes: - Optional collection of cyclical garbage Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) --------------------------------- PEP stands for Python Enhancement Proposal. A PEP is a design document providing information to the Python community, or describing a new feature for Python. The PEP should provide a concise technical specification of the feature and a rationale for the feature. We intend PEPs to be the primary mechanisms for proposing new features, for collecting community input on an issue, and for documenting the design decisions that have gone into Python. The PEP author is responsible for building consensus within the community and documenting dissenting opinions. The PEPs are available at http://python.sourceforge.net/peps/. Augmented Assignment -------------------- This must have been the most-requested feature of the past years! Eleven new assignment operators were added: += -= *= /= %= **= <<= >>= &= ^= |= For example, A += B is similar to A = A + B except that A is evaluated only once (relevant when A is something like dict[index].attr). However, if A is a mutable object, A may be modified in place. Thus, if A is a number or a string, A += B has the same effect as A = A+B (except A is only evaluated once); but if a is a list, A += B has the same effect as A.extend(B)! Classes and built-in object types can override the new operators in order to implement the in-place behavior; the not-in-place behavior is used automatically as a fallback when an object doesn't implement the in-place behavior. For classes, the method name is derived from the method name for the corresponding not-in-place operator by inserting an 'i' in front of the name, e.g. __iadd__ implements in-place __add__. Augmented assignment was implemented by Thomas Wouters. List Comprehensions ------------------- This is a flexible new notation for lists whose elements are computed from another list (or lists). The simplest form is: [ for in ] For example, [i**2 for i in range(4)] yields the list [0, 1, 4, 9]. This is more efficient than a for loop with a list.append() call. You can also add a condition: [ for in if ] For example, [w for w in words if w == w.lower()] would yield the list of words that contain no uppercase characters. This is more efficient than a for loop with an if statement and a list.append() call. You can also have nested for loops and more than one 'if' clause. For example, here's a function that flattens a sequence of sequences:: def flatten(seq): return [x for subseq in seq for x in subseq] flatten([[0], [1,2,3], [4,5], [6,7,8,9], []]) This prints [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9] List comprehensions originated as a patch set from Greg Ewing; Skip Montanaro and Thomas Wouters also contributed. Described by PEP 202. Extended Import Statement ------------------------- Many people have asked for a way to import a module under a different name. This can be accomplished like this: import foo bar = foo del foo but this common idiom gets old quickly. A simple extension of the import statement now allows this to be written as follows: import foo as bar There's also a variant for 'from ... import': from foo import bar as spam This also works with packages; e.g. you can write this: import test.regrtest as regrtest Note that 'as' is not a new keyword -- it is recognized only in this context (this is only possible because the syntax for the import statement doesn't involve expressions). Implemented by Thomas Wouters. Described by PEP 221. Extended Print Statement ------------------------ Easily the most controversial new feature, this extension to the print statement adds an option to make the output go to a different file than the default sys.stdout. For example, to write an error message to sys.stderr, you can now write: print >> sys.stderr, "Error: bad dog!" As a special feature, if the expression used to indicate the file evaluates to None, the current value of sys.stdout is used. Thus: print >> None, "Hello world" is equivalent to print "Hello world" Design and implementation by Barry Warsaw. Described by PEP 214. Optional Collection of Cyclical Garbage --------------------------------------- Python is now equipped with a garbage collector that can hunt down cyclical references between Python objects. It's no replacement for reference counting; in fact, it depends on the reference counts being correct, and decides that a set of objects belong to a cycle if all their reference counts can be accounted for from their references to each other. This devious scheme was first proposed by Eric Tiedemann, and brought to implementation by Neil Schemenauer. There's a module "gc" that lets you control some parameters of the garbage collection. There's also an option to the configure script that lets you enable or disable the garbage collection. In 2.0b1, it's on by default, so that we (hopefully) can collect decent user experience with this new feature. There are some questions about its performance. If it proves to be too much of a problem, we'll turn it off by default in the final 2.0 release. Smaller Changes --------------- A new function zip() was added. zip(seq1, seq2, ...) is equivalent to map(None, seq1, seq2, ...) when the sequences have the same length; i.e. zip([1,2,3], [10,20,30]) returns [(1,10), (2,20), (3,30)]. When the lists are not all the same length, the shortest list wins: zip([1,2,3], [10,20]) returns [(1,10), (2,20)]. See PEP 201. sys.version_info is a tuple (major, minor, micro, level, serial). Dictionaries have an odd new method, setdefault(key, default). dict.setdefault(key, default) returns dict[key] if it exists; if not, it sets dict[key] to default and returns that value. Thus: dict.setdefault(key, []).append(item) does the same work as this common idiom: if not dict.has_key(key): dict[key] = [] dict[key].append(item) There are two new variants of SyntaxError that are raised for indentation-related errors: IndentationError and TabError. Changed \x to consume exactly two hex digits; see PEP 223. Added \U escape that consumes exactly eight hex digits. The limits on the size of expressions and file in Python source code have been raised from 2**16 to 2**32. Previous versions of Python were limited because the maximum argument size the Python VM accepted was 2**16. This limited the size of object constructor expressions, e.g. [1,2,3] or {'a':1, 'b':2}, and the size of source files. This limit was raised thanks to a patch by Charles Waldman that effectively fixes the problem. It is now much more likely that you will be limited by available memory than by an arbitrary limit in Python. The interpreter's maximum recursion depth can be modified by Python programs using sys.getrecursionlimit and sys.setrecursionlimit. This limit is the maximum number of recursive calls that can be made by Python code. The limit exists to prevent infinite recursion from overflowing the C stack and causing a core dump. The default value is 1000. The maximum safe value for a particular platform can be found by running Misc/find_recursionlimit.py. New Modules and Packages ------------------------ atexit - for registering functions to be called when Python exits. imputil - Greg Stein's alternative API for writing custom import hooks. pyexpat - an interface to the Expat XML parser, contributed by Paul Prescod. xml - a new package with XML support code organized (so far) in three subpackages: xml.dom, xml.sax, and xml.parsers. Describing these would fill a volume. There's a special feature whereby a user-installed package named _xmlplus overrides the standard xmlpackage; this is intended to give the XML SIG a hook to distribute backwards-compatible updates to the standard xml package. webbrowser - a platform-independent API to launch a web browser. Changed Modules --------------- array -- new methods for array objects: count, extend, index, pop, and remove binascii -- new functions b2a_hex and a2b_hex that convert between binary data and its hex representation calendar -- Many new functions that support features including control over which day of the week is the first day, returning strings instead of printing them. Also new symbolic constants for days of week, e.g. MONDAY, ..., SUNDAY. cgi -- FieldStorage objects have a getvalue method that works like a dictionary's get method and returns the value attribute of the object. ConfigParser -- The parser object has new methods has_option, remove_section, remove_option, set, and write. They allow the module to be used for writing config files as well as reading them. ftplib -- ntransfercmd(), transfercmd(), and retrbinary() all now optionally support the RFC 959 REST command. gzip -- readline and readlines now accept optional size arguments httplib -- New interfaces and support for HTTP/1.1 by Greg Stein. See the module doc strings for details. locale -- implement getdefaultlocale for Win32 and Macintosh marshal -- no longer dumps core when marshaling deeply nested or recursive data structures os -- new functions isatty, seteuid, setegid, setreuid, setregid os/popen2 -- popen2/popen3/popen4 support under Windows. popen2/popen3 support under Unix. os/pty -- support for openpty and forkpty os.path -- fix semantics of os.path.commonprefix smtplib -- support for sending very long messages socket -- new function getfqdn() readline -- new functions to read, write and truncate history files. The readline section of the library reference manual contains an example. select -- add interface to poll system call shutil -- new copyfileobj function SimpleHTTPServer, CGIHTTPServer -- Fix problems with buffering in the HTTP server. Tkinter -- optimization of function flatten urllib -- scans environment variables for proxy configuration, e.g. http_proxy. whichdb -- recognizes dumbdbm format Obsolete Modules ---------------- None. However note that 1.6 made a whole slew of modules obsolete: stdwin, soundex, cml, cmpcache, dircache, dump, find, grep, packmail, poly, zmod, strop, util, whatsound. Changed, New, Obsolete Tools ---------------------------- None. C-level Changes --------------- Several cleanup jobs were carried out throughout the source code. All C code was converted to ANSI C; we got rid of all uses of the Py_PROTO() macro, which makes the header files a lot more readable. Most of the portability hacks were moved to a new header file, pyport.h; several other new header files were added and some old header files were removed, in an attempt to create a more rational set of header files. (Few of these ever need to be included explicitly; they are all included by Python.h.) Trent Mick ensured portability to 64-bit platforms, under both Linux and Win64, especially for the new Intel Itanium processor. Mick also added large file support for Linux64 and Win64. The C APIs to return an object's size have been update to consistently use the form PyXXX_Size, e.g. PySequence_Size and PyDict_Size. In previous versions, the abstract interfaces used PyXXX_Length and the concrete interfaces used PyXXX_Size. The old names, e.g. PyObject_Length, are still available for backwards compatibility at the API level, but are deprecated. The PyOS_CheckStack function has been implemented on Windows by Fredrik Lundh. It prevents Python from failing with a stack overflow on Windows. The GC changes resulted in creation of two new slots on object, tp_traverse and tp_clear. The augmented assignment changes result in the creation of a new slot for each in-place operator. The GC API creates new requirements for container types implemented in C extension modules. See Include/objimpl.h for details. PyErr_Format has been updated to automatically calculate the size of the buffer needed to hold the formatted result string. This change prevents crashes caused by programmer error. New C API calls: PyObject_AsFileDescriptor, PyErr_WriteUnraisable. PyRun_AnyFileEx, PyRun_SimpleFileEx, PyRun_FileEx -- New functions that are the same as their non-Ex counterparts except they take an extra flag argument that tells them to close the file when done. XXX There were other API changes that should be fleshed out here. Windows Changes --------------- New popen2/popen3/peopen4 in os module (see Changed Modules above). os.popen is much more usable on Windows 95 and 98. See Microsoft Knowledge Base article Q150956. The Win9x workaround described there is implemented by the new w9xpopen.exe helper in the root of your Python installation. Note that Python uses this internally; it is not a standalone program. Administrator privileges are no longer required to install Python on Windows NT or Windows 2000. If you have administrator privileges, Python's registry info will be written under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. Otherwise the installer backs off to writing Python's registry info under HKEY_CURRENT_USER. The latter is sufficient for all "normal" uses of Python, but will prevent some advanced uses from working (for example, running a Python script as an NT service, or possibly from CGI). [This was new in 1.6] The installer no longer runs a separate Tcl/Tk installer; instead, it installs the needed Tcl/Tk files directly in the Python directory. If you already have a Tcl/Tk installation, this wastes some disk space (about 4 Megs) but avoids problems with conflicting Tcl/Tk installations, and makes it much easier for Python to ensure that Tcl/Tk can find all its files. [This was new in 1.6] The Windows installer now installs by default in \Python20\ on the default volume, instead of \Program Files\Python-2.0\. Updates to the changes between 1.5.2 and 1.6 -------------------------------------------- The 1.6 NEWS file can't be changed after the release is done, so here is some late-breaking news: New APIs in locale.py: normalize(), getdefaultlocale(), resetlocale(), and changes to getlocale() and setlocale(). The new module is now enabled per default. It is not true that the encodings codecs cannot be used for normal strings: the string.encode() (which is also present on 8-bit strings !) allows using them for 8-bit strings too, e.g. to convert files from cp1252 (Windows) to latin-1 or vice-versa. Japanese codecs are available from Tamito KAJIYAMA: http://pseudo.grad.sccs.chukyo-u.ac.jp/~kajiyama/python/ ======================================================================