Python History

--------------

This file contains the release messages for previous Python releases.

As you read on you go back to the dark ages of Python's history.

======================================================================

What's New in Python 2.1 (final)?

=================================

We only changed a few things since the last release candidate, all in

Python library code:

- A bug in the locale module was fixed that affected locales which

define no grouping for numeric formatting.

- A few bugs in the weakref module's implementations of weak

dictionaries (WeakValueDictionary and WeakKeyDictionary) were fixed,

and the test suite was updated to check for these bugs.

- An old bug in the os.path.walk() function (introduced in Python

2.0!) was fixed: a non-existent file would cause an exception

instead of being ignored.

- Fixed a few bugs in the new symtable module found by Neil Norwitz's

PyChecker.

What's New in Python 2.1c2?

===========================

A flurry of small changes, and one showstopper fixed in the nick of

time made it necessary to release another release candidate. The list

here is the *complete* list of patches (except version updates):

Core

- Tim discovered a nasty bug in the dictionary code, caused by

PyDict_Next() calling dict_resize(), and the GC code's use of

PyDict_Next() violating an assumption in dict_items(). This was

fixed with considerable amounts of band-aid, but the net effect is a

saner and more robust implementation.

- Made a bunch of symbols static that were accidentally global.

Build and Ports

- The setup.py script didn't check for a new enough version of zlib

(1.1.3 is needed). Now it does.

- Changed "make clean" target to also remove shared libraries.

- Added a more general warning about the SGI Irix optimizer to README.

Library

- Fix a bug in urllib.basejoin("http://host", "../file.html") which

omitted the slash between host and file.html.

- The mailbox module's _Mailbox class contained a completely broken

and undocumented seek() method. Ripped it out.

- Fixed a bunch of typos in various library modules (urllib2, smtpd,

sgmllib, netrc, chunk) found by Neil Norwitz's PyChecker.

- Fixed a few last-minute bugs in unittest.

Extensions

- Reverted the patch to the OpenSSL code in socketmodule.c to support

RAND_status() and the EGD, and the subsequent patch that tried to

fix it for pre-0.9.5 versions; the problem with the patch is that on

some systems it issues a warning whenever socket is imported, and

that's unacceptable.

Tests

- Fixed the pickle tests to work with "import test.test_pickle".

- Tweaked test_locale.py to actually run the test Windows.

- In distutils/archive_util.py, call zipfile.ZipFile() with mode "w",

not "wb" (which is not a valid mode at all).

- Fix pstats browser crashes. Import readline if it exists to make

the user interface nicer.

- Add "import thread" to the top of test modules that import the

threading module (test_asynchat and test_threadedtempfile). This

prevents test failures caused by a broken threading module resulting

from a previously caught failed import.

- Changed test_asynchat.py to set the SO_REUSEADDR option; this was

needed on some platforms (e.g. Solaris 8) when the tests are run

twice in succession.

- Skip rather than fail test_sunaudiodev if no audio device is found.

What's New in Python 2.1c1?

===========================

This list was significantly updated when 2.1c2 was released; the 2.1c1

release didn't mention most changes that were actually part of 2.1c1:

Legal

- Copyright was assigned to the Python Software Foundation (PSF) and a

PSF license (very similar to the CNRI license) was added.

- The CNRI copyright notice was updated to include 2001.

Core

- After a public outcry, assignment to __debug__ is no longer illegal;

instead, a warning is issued. It will become illegal in 2.2.

- Fixed a core dump with "%#x" % 0, and changed the semantics so that

"%#x" now always prepends "0x", even if the value is zero.

- Fixed some nits in the bytecode compiler.

- Fixed core dumps when calling certain kinds of non-functions.

- Fixed various core dumps caused by reference count bugs.

Build and Ports

- Use INSTALL_SCRIPT to install script files.

- New port: SCO Unixware 7, by Billy G. Allie.

- Updated RISCOS port.

- Updated BeOS port and notes.

- Various other porting problems resolved.

Library

- The TERMIOS and SOCKET modules are now truly obsolete and

unnecessary. Their symbols are incorporated in the termios and

socket modules.

- Fixed some 64-bit bugs in pickle, cPickle, and struct, and added

better tests for pickling.

- threading: make Condition.wait() robust against KeyboardInterrupt.

- zipfile: add support to zipfile to support opening an archive

represented by an open file rather than a file name. Fix bug where

the archive was not properly closed. Fixed a bug in this bugfix

where flush() was called for a read-only file.

- imputil: added an uninstall() method to the ImportManager.

- Canvas: fixed bugs in lower() and tkraise() methods.

- SocketServer: API change (added overridable close_request() method)

so that the TCP server can explicitly close the request.

- pstats: Eric Raymond added a simple interactive statistics browser,

invoked when the module is run as a script.

- locale: fixed a problem in format().

- webbrowser: made it work when the BROWSER environment variable has a

value like "/usr/bin/netscape". Made it auto-detect Konqueror for

KDE 2. Fixed some other nits.

- unittest: changes to allow using a different exception than

AssertionError, and added a few more function aliases. Some other

small changes.

- urllib, urllib2: fixed redirect problems and a coupleof other nits.

- asynchat: fixed a critical bug in asynchat that slipped through the

2.1b2 release. Fixed another rare bug.

- Fix some unqualified except: clauses (always a bad code example).

XML

- pyexpat: new API get_version_string().

- Fixed some minidom bugs.

Extensions

- Fixed a core dump in _weakref. Removed the weakref.mapping()

function (it adds nothing to the API).

- Rationalized the use of header files in the readline module, to make

it compile (albeit with some warnings) with the very recent readline

4.2, without breaking for earlier versions.

- Hopefully fixed a buffering problem in linuxaudiodev.

- Attempted a fix to make the OpenSSL support in the socket module

work again with pre-0.9.5 versions of OpenSSL.

Tests

- Added a test case for asynchat and asyncore.

- Removed coupling between tests where one test failing could break

another.

Tools

- Ping added an interactive help browser to pydoc, fixed some nits

in the rest of the pydoc code, and added some features to his

inspect module.

- An updated python-mode.el version 4.1 which integrates Ken

Manheimer's pdbtrack.el. This makes debugging Python code via pdb

much nicer in XEmacs and Emacs. When stepping through your program

with pdb, in either the shell window or the *Python* window, the

source file and line will be tracked by an arrow. Very cool!

- IDLE: syntax warnings in interactive mode are changed into errors.

- Some improvements to Tools/webchecker (ignore some more URL types,

follow some more links).

- Brought the Tools/compiler package up to date.

What's New in Python 2.1 beta 2?

================================

(Unlisted are many fixed bugs, more documentation, etc.)

Core language, builtins, and interpreter

- The nested scopes work (enabled by "from __future__ import

nested_scopes") is completed; in particular, the future now extends

into code executed through exec, eval() and execfile(), and into the

interactive interpreter.

- When calling a base class method (e.g. BaseClass.__init__(self)),

this is now allowed even if self is not strictly spoken a class

instance (e.g. when using metaclasses or the Don Beaudry hook).

- Slice objects are now comparable but not hashable; this prevents

dict[:] from being accepted but meaningless.

- Complex division is now calculated using less braindead algorithms.

This doesn't change semantics except it's more likely to give useful

results in extreme cases. Complex repr() now uses full precision

like float repr().

- sgmllib.py now calls handle_decl() for simple <!...> declarations.

- It is illegal to assign to the name __debug__, which is set when the

interpreter starts. It is effectively a compile-time constant.

- A warning will be issued if a global statement for a variable

follows a use or assignment of that variable.

Standard library

- unittest.py, a unit testing framework by Steve Purcell (PyUNIT,

inspired by JUnit), is now part of the standard library. You now

have a choice of two testing frameworks: unittest requires you to

write testcases as separate code, doctest gathers them from

docstrings. Both approaches have their advantages and

disadvantages.

- A new module Tix was added, which wraps the Tix extension library

for Tk. With that module, it is not necessary to statically link

Tix with _tkinter, since Tix will be loaded with Tcl's "package

require" command. See Demo/tix/.

- tzparse.py is now obsolete.

- In gzip.py, the seek() and tell() methods are removed -- they were

non-functional anyway, and it's better if callers can test for their

existence with hasattr().

Python/C API

- PyDict_Next(): it is now safe to call PyDict_SetItem() with a key

that's already in the dictionary during a PyDict_Next() iteration.

This used to fail occasionally when a dictionary resize operation

could be triggered that would rehash all the keys. All other

modifications to the dictionary are still off-limits during a

PyDict_Next() iteration!

- New extended APIs related to passing compiler variables around.

- New abstract APIs PyObject_IsInstance(), PyObject_IsSubclass()

implement isinstance() and issubclass().

- Py_BuildValue() now has a "D" conversion to create a Python complex

number from a Py_complex C value.

- Extensions types which support weak references must now set the

field allocated for the weak reference machinery to NULL themselves;

this is done to avoid the cost of checking each object for having a

weakly referencable type in PyObject_INIT(), since most types are

not weakly referencable.

- PyFrame_FastToLocals() and PyFrame_LocalsToFast() copy bindings for

free variables and cell variables to and from the frame's f_locals.

- Variants of several functions defined in pythonrun.h have been added

to support the nested_scopes future statement. The variants all end

in Flags and take an extra argument, a PyCompilerFlags *; examples:

PyRun_AnyFileExFlags(), PyRun_InteractiveLoopFlags(). These

variants may be removed in Python 2.2, when nested scopes are

mandatory.

Distutils

- the sdist command now writes a PKG-INFO file, as described in PEP 241,

into the release tree.

- several enhancements to the bdist_wininst command from Thomas Heller

(an uninstaller, more customization of the installer's display)

- from Jack Jansen: added Mac-specific code to generate a dialog for

users to specify the command-line (because providing a command-line with

MacPython is awkward). Jack also made various fixes for the Mac

and the Metrowerks compiler.

- added 'platforms' and 'keywords' to the set of metadata that can be

specified for a distribution.

- applied patches from Jason Tishler to make the compiler class work with

Cygwin.

What's New in Python 2.1 beta 1?

================================

Core language, builtins, and interpreter

- Following an outcry from the community about the amount of code

broken by the nested scopes feature introduced in 2.1a2, we decided

to make this feature optional, and to wait until Python 2.2 (or at

least 6 months) to make it standard. The option can be enabled on a

per-module basis by adding "from __future__ import nested_scopes" at

the beginning of a module (before any other statements, but after

comments and an optional docstring). See PEP 236 (Back to the

__future__) for a description of the __future__ statement. PEP 227

(Statically Nested Scopes) has been updated to reflect this change,

and to clarify the semantics in a number of endcases.

- The nested scopes code, when enabled, has been hardened, and most

bugs and memory leaks in it have been fixed.

- Compile-time warnings are now generated for a number of conditions

that will break or change in meaning when nested scopes are enabled:

- Using "from...import *" or "exec" without in-clause in a function

scope that also defines a lambda or nested function with one or

more free (non-local) variables. The presence of the import* or

bare exec makes it impossible for the compiler to determine the

exact set of local variables in the outer scope, which makes it

impossible to determine the bindings for free variables in the

inner scope. To avoid the warning about import *, change it into

an import of explicitly name object, or move the import* statement

to the global scope; to avoid the warning about bare exec, use

exec...in... (a good idea anyway -- there's a possibility that

bare exec will be deprecated in the future).

- Use of a global variable in a nested scope with the same name as a

local variable in a surrounding scope. This will change in

meaning with nested scopes: the name in the inner scope will

reference the variable in the outer scope rather than the global

of the same name. To avoid the warning, either rename the outer

variable, or use a global statement in the inner function.

- An optional object allocator has been included. This allocator is

optimized for Python objects and should be faster and use less memory

than the standard system allocator. It is not enabled by default

because of possible thread safety problems. The allocator is only

protected by the Python interpreter lock and it is possible that some

extension modules require a thread safe allocator. The object

allocator can be enabled by providing the "--with-pymalloc" option to

configure.

Standard library

- pyexpat now detects the expat version if expat.h defines it. A

number of additional handlers are provided, which are only available

since expat 1.95. In addition, the methods SetParamEntityParsing and

GetInputContext of Parser objects are available with 1.95.x

only. Parser objects now provide the ordered_attributes and

specified_attributes attributes. A new module expat.model was added,

which offers a number of additional constants if 1.95.x is used.

- xml.dom offers the new functions registerDOMImplementation and

getDOMImplementation.

- xml.dom.minidom offers a toprettyxml method. A number of DOM

conformance issues have been resolved. In particular, Element now

has an hasAttributes method, and the handling of namespaces was

improved.

- Ka-Ping Yee contributed two new modules: inspect.py, a module for

getting information about live Python code, and pydoc.py, a module

for interactively converting docstrings to HTML or text.

Tools/scripts/pydoc, which is now automatically installed into

<prefix>/bin, uses pydoc.py to display documentation; try running

"pydoc -h" for instructions. "pydoc -g" pops up a small GUI that

lets you browse the module docstrings using a web browser.

- New library module difflib.py, primarily packaging the SequenceMatcher

class at the heart of the popular ndiff.py file-comparison tool.

- doctest.py (a framework for verifying Python code examples in docstrings)

is now part of the std library.

Windows changes

- A new entry in the Start menu, "Module Docs", runs "pydoc -g" -- a

small GUI that lets you browse the module docstrings using your

default web browser.

- Import is now case-sensitive. PEP 235 (Import on Case-Insensitive

Platforms) is implemented. See

http://python.sourceforge.net/peps/pep-0235.html

for full details, especially the "Current Lower-Left Semantics" section.

The new Windows import rules are simpler than before:

A. If the PYTHONCASEOK environment variable exists, same as

before: silently accept the first case-insensitive match of any

kind; raise ImportError if none found.

B. Else search sys.path for the first case-sensitive match; raise

ImportError if none found.

The same rules have been implemented on other platforms with case-

insensitive but case-preserving filesystems too (including Cygwin, and

several flavors of Macintosh operating systems).

- winsound module: Under Win9x, winsound.Beep() now attempts to simulate

what it's supposed to do (and does do under NT and 2000) via direct

port manipulation. It's unknown whether this will work on all systems,

but it does work on my Win98SE systems now and was known to be useless on

all Win9x systems before.

- Build: Subproject _test (effectively) renamed to _testcapi.

New platforms

- 2.1 should compile and run out of the box under MacOS X, even using HFS+.

Thanks to Steven Majewski!

- 2.1 should compile and run out of the box on Cygwin. Thanks to Jason

Tishler!

- 2.1 contains new files and patches for RISCOS, thanks to Dietmar

Schwertberger! See RISCOS/README for more information -- it seems

that because of the bizarre filename conventions on RISCOS, no port

to that platform is easy.

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.

- Removed the obsolete soundex module.

- xml.dom.minidom now uses the standard DOM exceptions. Node supports

the isSameNode method; NamedNodeMap the get method.

- xml.sax.expatreader supports the lexical handler property; it

generates comment, startCDATA, and endCDATA events.

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.

- The outcome of comparing non-numeric objects of different types is

not defined by the language, other than that it's arbitrary but

consistent (see the Reference Manual). An implementation detail changed

in 2.1a1 such that None now compares less than any other object. Code

relying on this new behavior (like code that relied on the previous

behavior) does so at its own risk.

- 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 (after loading module M)

sys.modules['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

import imp,sys,string

magic = string.join(["\\x%.2x" % ord(c) for c in imp.get_magic()],"")

reg = ':pyc:M::%s::%s:' % (magic, sys.executable)

open("/proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register","wb").write(reg)

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.

- The pyexpat module supports a number of new handlers, which are

available only in expat 1.2. If invocation of a callback fails, it

will report an additional frame in the traceback. Parser objects

participate now in garbage collection. If expat reports an unknown

encoding, pyexpat will try to use a Python codec; that works only

for single-byte charsets. The parser type objects is exposed as

XMLParserObject.

- xml.dom now offers standard definitions for symbolic node type and

exception code constants, and a hierarchy of DOM exceptions. minidom

was adjusted to use them.

- The conformance of xml.dom.minidom to the DOM specification was

improved. It detects a number of additional error cases; the

previous/next relationship works even when the tree is modified;

Node supports the normalize() method; NamedNodeMap, DocumentType and

DOMImplementation classes were added; Element supports the

hasAttribute and hasAttributeNS methods; and Text supports the splitText

method.

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.