What's new since 1.4 beta 1?

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

- Portability bug in the md5.h header solved.

- The PC build procedure now really works, and sets sys.platform to a

meaningful value (a few things were botched in beta 1). Lib/dos_8x3

is now a standard part of the distribution (alas).

- Installation has been completely overhauled. Typing "make install"

now installs everything (not just the binary), inserts the version

number in the pathnames of almost everything installed, uses the

install-sh script to install each file, and creates the machine

dependent modules (FCNTL.py etc.) if not supplied by the

distribution. (XXX There's still a problem with the latter because

the "regen" script requires that Python is installed. Some manual

intervention may still be required.)

- New modules: errno, operator.

- Changes for use with Numerical Python: builtin function slice() and

Ellipses object, and corresponding syntax:

x[lo:hi:stride] == x[slice(lo, hi, stride)]

x[a, ..., z] == x[(a, Ellipses, z)]

- New documentation for errno and cgi mdoules.

- The directory containing the script passed to the interpreter is

inserted in from of sys.path; "." is no longer a default path

component.

- Optional third string argument to string.translate() specifies

characters to delete. New function string.maketrans() creates a

translation table for translate() or for regex.compile().

- Module posix (and hence module os under Unix) now supports putenv().

Moreover, module os is enhanced so that if putenv() is supported,

assignments to os.environ entries make the appropriate putenv() call.

(XXX the putenv() implementation can leak a small amount of memory per

call.)

- pdb.py can now be invoked from the command line to debug a script:

python pdb.py <script> <arg> ...

- Much improved parseaddr() in rfc822.

- In cgi.py, you can now pass an alternative value for environ to

nearly all functions.

- You can now assign to instance variables whose name begins and ends

with '__'.

- New version of Fred Drake's parser module and associates (token,

symbol, AST).

- New PYTHON_API_VERSION value.

- The "complex" internal structure type is now called "Py_complex" to

avoid name conflicts.

- Numerous small bugs fixed.

- Slight pickle speedups.

- Some slight speedups suggested by Sjoerd (more coming in 1.4 final).

- NeXT portability mods by Bill Bumgarner integrated.

- Modules regexmodule.c, bsddbmodule.c and xxmodule.c have been

converted to new naming style.

What's new since Python release 1.3?

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

- Added sys.platform and sys.exec_platform for Bill Janssen.

XXX more...