former lets you give an instance a set of new instance vars. The
latter lets you give it a new class. Both are typechecked and
disallowed in restricted mode.
For classes, the check for read-only special attributes is tightened
so that only assignments to __dict__, __bases__, __name__,
__getattr__, __setattr__, and __delattr__ (these could be made to work
as well, but I don't know if that's useful -- let's see first whether
mucking with instances will help).
Removed im_doc attribute; __name__ and __doc__ are now handled by
special casing in instancemethodgetattr(). This saves a few bytes and
INCREF/DECREF calls per i.m. object allocation/deallocation.
entirely redone operator overloading. The rules for class
instances are now much more relaxed than for other built-in types
(whose coerce must still return two objects of the same type)
* Objects/floatobject.c: add overflow check when converting float
to int and implement truncation towards zero using ceil/float
* Objects/longobject.c: change ValueError to OverflowError when
converting to int
* Objects/rangeobject.c: modernized
* Objects/stringobject.c: use HAVE_LIMITS instead of __STDC__
* Objects/xxobject.c: changed to use new style (not finished?)
and __setattr__ support to override getattr(x, name) and
setattr(x, name, value) for class instances. This uses a special
hack whereby the class is supposed to be static: the __getattr__
and __setattr__ methods are looked up only once and saved in the
instance structure for speed
* posixmodule.c: don't prototype getcwd() -- it's not portable...
* mappingobject.c: double-check validity of last_name_char in
dict{lookup,insert,remove}.
* arraymodule.c: need memmove only for non-STDC Suns.
* Makefile: comment out HTML_LIBS and XT_USE by default
* pythonmain.c: don't prototype getopt() -- it's not standardized
* socketmodule.c: cast flags arg to {get,set}sockopt() and addrbuf arg to
recvfrom() to (ANY*).
* pythonrun.c (initsigs): fix prototype, make it static
* intobject.c (LONG_BIT): only #define it if not already defined
* classobject.[ch]: remove all references to unused instance_convert()
* mappingobject.c (getmappingsize): Don't return NULL in int function.
without .py file); Bill's dynamic loading for SunOS using shared
libraries.
pwdmodule.c (mkgrent): remove DECREF of uninitialized variable.
classobject.c (instance_getattr): Fix case when class lookup returns
unbound method instead of function.
function found as instance data.
* socketmodule.c: added 'flags' argument sendto/recvfrom, rewrite
argument parsing in send/recv.
* More changes related to access (terminology change: owner instead of
class; allow any object as owner; local/global variables are owned
by their dictionary, only class/instance data is owned by the class;
"from...import *" now only imports objects with public access; etc.)
* Added "access *: ...", made access work for class methods.
* Introduced subclass check: make sure that when calling
ClassName.methodname(instance, ...), the instance is an instance of
ClassName or of a subclass thereof (this might break some old code!)
Guido van Rossum
Sjoerd Mullender