What's New in Python 2.0b1? =========================== 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/) ====================================================================== 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, [x**2 for i in range(4)] yields the list [0, 1, 4, 9]. This is more efficient than map() with a lambda. 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 filter() with a lambda. 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 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\. ======================================================================