cpython/Doc/whatsnew/2.7.rst

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****************************
What's New in Python 2.7
****************************
:Author: A.M. Kuchling (amk at amk.ca)
:Release: |release|
:Date: |today|
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.. Fix accents on Kristjan Valur Jonsson, Fuerstenau, Tarek Ziade.
.. OrderedDict
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.. $Id$
Rules for maintenance:
* Anyone can add text to this document. Do not spend very much time
on the wording of your changes, because your text will probably
get rewritten to some degree.
* The maintainer will go through Misc/NEWS periodically and add
changes; it's therefore more important to add your changes to
Misc/NEWS than to this file.
* This is not a complete list of every single change; completeness
is the purpose of Misc/NEWS. Some changes I consider too small
or esoteric to include. If such a change is added to the text,
I'll just remove it. (This is another reason you shouldn't spend
too much time on writing your addition.)
* If you want to draw your new text to the attention of the
maintainer, add 'XXX' to the beginning of the paragraph or
section.
* It's OK to just add a fragmentary note about a change. For
example: "XXX Describe the transmogrify() function added to the
socket module." The maintainer will research the change and
write the necessary text.
* You can comment out your additions if you like, but it's not
necessary (especially when a final release is some months away).
* Credit the author of a patch or bugfix. Just the name is
sufficient; the e-mail address isn't necessary.
* It's helpful to add the bug/patch number in a parenthetical comment.
XXX Describe the transmogrify() function added to the socket
module.
(Contributed by P.Y. Developer; :issue:`12345`.)
This saves the maintainer some effort going through the SVN logs
when researching a change.
This article explains the new features in Python 2.7.
No release schedule has been decided yet for 2.7.
.. Compare with previous release in 2 - 3 sentences here.
add hyperlink when the documentation becomes available online.
.. ========================================================================
.. Large, PEP-level features and changes should be described here.
.. ========================================================================
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PEP 372: Adding an ordered dictionary to collections
=============================
XXX write this
Several modules will now use :class:`OrderedDict` by default. The
:mod:`ConfigParser` module uses :class:`OrderedDict` for the list
of sections and the options within a section.
The :method:`namedtuple._asdict` method returns an :class:`OrderedDict`
as well.
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Other Language Changes
======================
Some smaller changes made to the core Python language are:
* The :func:`int` and :func:`long` types gained a ``bit_length``
method that returns the number of bits necessary to represent
its argument in binary::
>>> n = 37
>>> bin(37)
'0b100101'
>>> n.bit_length()
6
>>> n = 2**123-1
>>> n.bit_length()
123
>>> (n+1).bit_length()
124
(Contributed by Fredrik Johansson and Victor Stinner; :issue:`3439`.)
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.. ======================================================================
Optimizations
-------------
A few performance enhancements have been added:
* The garbage collector now performs better when many objects are
being allocated without deallocating any. A full garbage collection
pass is only performed when the middle generation has been collected
10 times and when the number of survivor objects from the middle
generation exceeds 10% of the number of objects in the oldest
generation. The second condition was added to reduce the number
of full garbage collections as the number of objects on the heap grows,
avoiding quadratic performance when allocating very many objects.
(Suggested by Martin von Loewis and implemented by Antoine Pitrou;
:issue:`4074`.)
* The garbage collector tries to avoid tracking simple containers
which can't be part of a cycle. In Python 2.7, this is now true for
tuples and dicts containing atomic types (such as ints, strings,
etc.). Transitively, a dict containing tuples of atomic types won't
be tracked either. This helps reduce the cost of each
garbage collection by decreasing the number of objects to be
considered and traversed by the collector.
(Contributed by Antoine Pitrou; :issue:`4688`.)
* Integers are now stored internally either in base 2**15 or in base
2**30, the base being determined at build time. Previously, they
were always stored in base 2**15. Using base 2**30 gives
significant performance improvements on 64-bit machines, but
benchmark results on 32-bit machines have been mixed. Therefore,
the default is to use base 2**30 on 64-bit machines and base 2**15
on 32-bit machines; on Unix, there's a new configure option
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:option:`--enable-big-digits` that can be used to override this default.
Apart from the performance improvements this change should be
invisible to end users, with one exception: for testing and
debugging purposes there's a new structseq ``sys.long_info`` that
provides information about the internal format, giving the number of
bits per digit and the size in bytes of the C type used to store
each digit::
>>> import sys
>>> sys.long_info
sys.long_info(bits_per_digit=30, sizeof_digit=4)
(Contributed by Mark Dickinson; :issue:`4258`.)
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* The division algorithm for long integers has been made faster
by tightening the inner loop, doing shifts instead of multiplications,
and fixing an unnecessary extra iteration.
Various benchmarks show speedups of between 50% and 150% for long
integer divisions and modulo operations.
(Contributed by Mark Dickinson; :issue:`5512`.)
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.. ======================================================================
New, Improved, and Deprecated Modules
=====================================
As in every release, Python's standard library received a number of
enhancements and bug fixes. Here's a partial list of the most notable
changes, sorted alphabetically by module name. Consult the
:file:`Misc/NEWS` file in the source tree for a more complete list of
changes, or look through the Subversion logs for all the details.
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* It is no longer mandatory to store clear-text passwords in the
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:file:`.pypirc` file when registering and uploading packages to PyPI. As long
as the username is present in that file, the :mod:`distutils` package will
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prompt for the password if not present. (Added by Tarek Ziade,
with the initial contribution by Nathan Van Gheem; :issue:`4394`.)
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* The :mod:`bz2` module's :class:`BZ2File` now supports the context
management protocol, so you can write ``with bz2.BZ2File(...) as f: ...``.
(Contributed by Hagen Fuerstenau; :issue:`3860`.)
* A new :class:`Counter` class in the :mod:`collections` module is
useful for tallying data. :class:`Counter` instances behave mostly
like dictionaries but return zero for missing keys instead of
raising a :exc:`KeyError`::
>>> from collections import Counter
>>> c=Counter()
>>> for letter in 'here is a sample of english text':
... c[letter] += 1
...
>>> c
Counter({' ': 6, 'e': 5, 's': 3, 'a': 2, 'i': 2, 'h': 2,
'l': 2, 't': 2, 'g': 1, 'f': 1, 'm': 1, 'o': 1, 'n': 1,
'p': 1, 'r': 1, 'x': 1})
>>> c['e']
5
>>> c['z']
0
There are two additional :class:`Counter` methods: :meth:`most_common`
returns the N most common elements and their counts, and :meth:`elements`
returns an iterator over the contained element, repeating each element
as many times as its count::
>>> c.most_common(5)
[(' ', 6), ('e', 5), ('s', 3), ('a', 2), ('i', 2)]
>>> c.elements() ->
'a', 'a', ' ', ' ', ' ', ' ', ' ', ' ',
'e', 'e', 'e', 'e', 'e', 'g', 'f', 'i', 'i',
'h', 'h', 'm', 'l', 'l', 'o', 'n', 'p', 's',
's', 's', 'r', 't', 't', 'x']
Contributed by Raymond Hettinger; :issue:`1696199`.
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* In Distutils, :func:`distutils.sdist.add_defaults` now uses
*package_dir* and *data_files* to feed MANIFEST.
* A new function in the :mod:`gc` module, :func:`is_tracked`, returns
True if a given instance is tracked by the garbage collector, False
otherwise. (Contributed by Antoine Pitrou; :issue:`4688`.)
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* The :mod:`gzip` module's :class:`GzipFile` now supports the context
management protocol, so you can write ``with gzip.GzipFile(...) as f: ...``.
(Contributed by Hagen Fuerstenau; :issue:`3860`.)
* The :class:`io.FileIO` class now raises an :exc:`OSError` when passed
an invalid file descriptor. (Implemented by Benjamin Peterson;
:issue:`4991`.)
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* The :class:`itertools`
* The :mod:`json` module was upgraded to version 2.0.9 of the
simplejson package, which includes a C extension that makes
encoding and decoding faster.
(Contributed by Bob Ippolito; :issue:`4136`.)
To support the new :class:`OrderedDict` type, :func:`json.load`
now has an optional *object_pairs_hook* parameter that will be called
with any object literal that decodes to a list of pairs.
(Contributed by Raymond Hettinger; :issue:`5381`.)
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* The :mod:`pydoc` module now has help for the various symbols that Python
uses. You can now do ``help('<<')`` or ``help('@')``, for example.
(Contributed by David Laban; :issue:`4739`.)
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* A new function in the :mod:`subprocess` module,
:func:`check_output`, runs a command with a specified set of arguments
and returns the command's output as a string if the command runs without
error, or raises a :exc:`CalledProcessError` exception otherwise.
::
>>> subprocess.check_output(['df', '-h', '.'])
'Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on\n
/dev/disk0s2 52G 49G 3.0G 94% /\n'
>>> subprocess.check_output(['df', '-h', '/bogus'])
...
subprocess.CalledProcessError: Command '['df', '-h', '/bogus']' returned non-zero exit status 1
(Contributed by Gregory P. Smith.)
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* The :mod:`unittest` module was enhanced in several ways.
Test cases can raise the :exc:`SkipTest` exception to skip a test.
(:issue:`1034053`.)
It will now use 'x' for expected failures
and 'u' for unexpected successes when run in its verbose mode.
(Contributed by Benjamin Peterson.)
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* The :func:`is_zipfile` function in the :mod:`zipfile` module will now
accept a file object, in addition to the path names accepted in earlier
versions. (Contributed by Gabriel Genellina; :issue:`4756`.)
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.. ======================================================================
.. whole new modules get described in subsections here
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importlib: Importing Modules
------------------------------
XXX write this
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ttk: Themed Widgets for Tk
--------------------------
Tcl/Tk 8.5 includes a set of themed widgets that re-implement basic Tk
widgets but have a more customizable appearance and can therefore more
closely resemble the native platform's widgets. This widget
set was originally called Tile, but was renamed to Ttk (for "themed Tk")
on being added to Tcl/Tck release 8.5.
XXX write a brief discussion and an example here.
The :mod:`ttk` module was written by Guilherme Polo and added in
:issue:`2983`. An alternate version called ``Tile.py``, written by
Martin Franklin and maintained by Kevin Walzer, was proposed for
inclusion in :issue:`2618`, but the authors argued that Guilherme
Polo's work was more comprehensive.
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.. ======================================================================
Build and C API Changes
=======================
Changes to Python's build process and to the C API include:
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* If you use the :file:`.gdbinit` file provided with Python,
the "pyo" macro in the 2.7 version will now work when the thread being
debugged doesn't hold the GIL; the macro will now acquire it before printing.
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(Contributed by Victor Stinner; :issue:`3632`.)
* :cfunc:`Py_AddPendingCall` is now thread safe, letting any
worker thread submit notifications to the main Python thread. This
is particularly useful for asynchronous IO operations.
(Contributed by Kristjan Valur Jonsson; :issue:`4293`.)
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.. ======================================================================
Port-Specific Changes: Windows
-----------------------------------
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* The :mod:`msvcrt` module now contains some constants from
the :file:`crtassem.h` header file:
:data:`CRT_ASSEMBLY_VERSION`,
:data:`VC_ASSEMBLY_PUBLICKEYTOKEN`,
and :data:`LIBRARIES_ASSEMBLY_NAME_PREFIX`.
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(Contributed by David Cournapeau; :issue:`4365`.)
* The new :cfunc:`_beginthreadex` API is used to start threads, and
the native thread-local storage functions are now used.
(Contributed by Kristjan Valur Jonsson; :issue:`3582`.)
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.. ======================================================================
Port-Specific Changes: Mac OS X
-----------------------------------
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Other Changes and Fixes
=======================
* The :file:`regrtest.py` script now takes a :option:`--randseed=`
switch that takes an integer that will be used as the random seed
for the :option:`-r` option that executes tests in random order.
The :option:`-r` option also now reports the seed that was used
(Added by Collin Winter.)
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.. ======================================================================
Porting to Python 2.7
=====================
This section lists previously described changes and other bugfixes
that may require changes to your code:
To be written.
.. ======================================================================
.. _acks27:
Acknowledgements
================
The author would like to thank the following people for offering
suggestions, corrections and assistance with various drafts of this
article: no one yet.