XXX Remaining problems:
- The GC module doesn't know about these; I think it has its reasons
to disallow calling __del__, but for now, __del__ on new-style
objects is called when the GC module discards an object, for better
or for worse.
- The code to call a __del__ handler is really ridiculously
complicated, due to all the different debug #ifdefs. I've copied
this from the similar code in classobject.c, so I'm pretty sure I
did it right, but it's not pretty. :-(
- No tests yet.
outer level, the iterator protocol is used for memory-efficiency (the
outer sequence may be very large if fully materialized); at the inner
level, PySequence_Fast() is used for time-efficiency (these should
always be sequences of length 2).
dictobject.c, new functions PyDict_{Merge,Update}FromSeq2. These are
wholly analogous to PyDict_{Merge,Update}, but process a sequence-of-2-
sequences argument instead of a mapping object. For now, I left these
functions file static, so no corresponding doc changes. It's tempting
to change dict.update() to allow a sequence-of-2-seqs argument too.
Also changed the name of dictionary's keyword argument from "mapping"
to "x". Got a better name? "mapping_or_sequence_of_pairs" isn't
attractive, although more so than "mosop" <wink>.
abstract.h, abstract.tex: Added new PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE function,
much faster than going thru the all-purpose PySequence_Size.
libfuncs.tex:
- Document dictionary().
- Fiddle tuple() and list() to admit that their argument is optional.
- The long-winded repetitions of "a sequence, a container that supports
iteration, or an iterator object" is getting to be a PITA. Many
months ago I suggested factoring this out into "iterable object",
where the definition of that could include being explicit about
generators too (as is, I'm not sure a reader outside of PythonLabs
could guess that "an iterator object" includes a generator call).
- Please check my curly braces -- I'm going blind <0.9 wink>.
abstract.c, PySequence_Tuple(): When PyObject_GetIter() fails, leave
its error msg alone now (the msg it produces has improved since
PySequence_Tuple was generalized to accept iterable objects, and
PySequence_Tuple was also stomping on the msg in cases it shouldn't
have even before PyObject_GetIter grew a better msg).
This adds unsetenv to posix, and uses it in the __delitem__ method of
os.environ.
(XXX Should we change the preferred name for putenv to setenv, for
consistency?)
This is a big one, touching lots of files. Some of the platforms
aren't tested yet. Briefly, this changes the return value of the
os/posix functions stat(), fstat(), statvfs(), fstatvfs(), and the
time functions localtime(), gmtime(), and strptime() from tuples into
pseudo-sequences. When accessed as a sequence, they behave exactly as
before. But they also have attributes like st_mtime or tm_year. The
stat return value, moreover, has a few platform-specific attributes
that are not available through the sequence interface (because
everybody expects the sequence to have a fixed length, these couldn't
be added there). If your platform's struct stat doesn't define
st_blksize, st_blocks or st_rdev, they won't be accessible from Python
either.
(Still missing is a documentation update.)
This changes Pythread_start_thread() to return the thread ID, or -1
for an error. (It's technically an incompatible API change, but I
doubt anyone calls it.)
call, or via setting an instance or class vrbl.
Rewrote the calibration docs.
Modern boxes are so friggin' fast, and a profiler event does so much work
anyway, that the cost of looking up an instance vrbl (the bias constant)
per profile event just isn't a big deal.
actual run of the profiler, instead of timing a simplified simulation of
part of what the profiler does. It computes a constant about 60% higher
on my Win98SE box than the old method, and the new constant appears much
more realistic. Deleted the undocumented simple(), instrumented(), and
profiler_simulation() methods (which existed only to support the previous
calibration method).
from Tim Hochberg. Also mucho fiddling to change the way doctest
determines whether a thing is a function, module or class. Under 2.2,
this really requires the functions in inspect.py (e.g., types.ClassType
is close to meaningless now, if not outright misleading).
Generalize PyLong_AsLongLong to accept int arguments too. The real point
is so that PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code does too. That code was
undocumented (AFAICT), so documented it.
- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel, doc.
Note that the real purpose of the 'f' prefix is to make fdel fit in
('del' is a keyword, so can't used as a keyword argument name).
- These map to visible readonly attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel',
and '__doc__' in the property object.
- fget/fset/fdel weren't discoverable from Python before.
- __doc__ is new, and allows to associate a docstring with a property.
iterable object. I'm not sure how that got overlooked before!
Got rid of the internal _PySequence_IterContains, introduced a new
internal _PySequence_IterSearch, and rewrote all the iteration-based
"count of", "index of", and "is the object in it or not?" routines to
just call the new function. I suppose it's slower this way, but the
code duplication was getting depressing.
Curious: the MS docs say stati64 etc are supported even on Win95, but
Win95 doesn't support a filesystem that allows partitions > 2 Gb.
test_largefile: This was opening its test file in text mode. I have no
idea how that worked under Win64, but it sure needs binary mode on Win98.
BTW, on Win98 test_largefile runs quickly (under a second).
requires that errno ever get set, and it looks like glibc is already
playing that game. New rules:
+ Never use HUGE_VAL. Use the new Py_HUGE_VAL instead.
+ Never believe errno. If overflow is the only thing you're interested in,
use the new Py_OVERFLOWED(x) macro. If you're interested in any libm
errors, use the new Py_SET_ERANGE_IF_OVERFLOW(x) macro, which attempts
to set errno the way C89 said it worked.
Unfortunately, none of these are reliable, but they work on Windows and I
*expect* under glibc too.
getting Infs, NaNs, or nonsense in 2.1 and before; in yesterday's CVS we
were getting OverflowError; but these functions always make good sense
for positive arguments, no matter how large).
the fiddling is simply due to that no caller of PyLong_AsDouble ever
checked for failure (so that's fixing old bugs). PyLong_AsDouble is much
faster for big inputs now too, but that's more of a happy consequence
than a design goal.
bag. It's clearly wrong for classic classes, at heart because a classic
class doesn't have a __class__ attribute, and I'm unclear on whether
that's feature or bug. I'll repair this once I find out (in the
meantime, dir() applied to classic classes won't find the base classes,
while dir() applied to a classic-class instance *will* find the base
classes but not *their* base classes).
Please give the new dir() a try and see whether you love it or hate it.
The new dir([]) behavior is something I could come to love. Here's
something to hate:
>>> class C:
... pass
...
>>> c = C()
>>> dir(c)
['__doc__', '__module__']
>>>
The idea that an instance has a __doc__ attribute is jarring (of course
it's really c.__class__.__doc__ == C.__doc__; likewise for __module__).
OTOH, the code already has too many special cases, and dir(x) doesn't
have a compelling or clear purpose when x isn't a module.
Stephen Hansen reported via email that he didn't finish the port to
Borland C, so remove the old item saying it worked and add a new item
saying what I know; I've asked Stephen for more details.
- Do not compile unicodeobject, unicodectype, and unicodedata if Unicode is disabled
- check for Py_USING_UNICODE in all places that use Unicode functions
- disables unicode literals, and the builtin functions
- add the types.StringTypes list
- remove Unicode literals from most tests.
__dict__ attribute. Deleting it, or setting it to a non-dictionary
result in a TypeError. Note that getting it the first time magically
initializes it to an empty dict so that func.__dict__ will always
appear to be a dictionary (never None).
Closes SF bug #446645.
(Tim & I should agree on where to add new additions: I add them at the
top, Tim adds them at the bottom. I like the top better because folks
who occasionally check out the NEWS file will see the latest news
first.)
This completes the q/Q project.
longobject.c _PyLong_AsByteArray: The original code had a gross bug:
the most-significant Python digit doesn't necessarily have SHIFT
significant bits, and you really need to count how many copies of the sign
bit it has else spurious overflow errors result.
test_struct.py: This now does exhaustive std q/Q testing at, and on both
sides of, all relevant power-of-2 boundaries, both positive and negative.
NEWS: Added brief dict news while I was at it.
native mode, and only when config #defines HAVE_LONG_LONG. Standard mode
will eventually treat them as 8-byte ints across all platforms, but that
likely requires a new set of routines in longobject.c first (while
sizeof(long) >= 4 is guaranteed by C, there's nothing in C we can rely
on x-platform to hold 8 bytes of int, so we'll have to roll our own;
I'm thinking of a simple pair of conversion functions, Python long
to/from sized vector of unsigned bytes; that may be useful for GMP
conversions too; std q/Q would call them with size fixed at 8).
test_struct.py: In addition to adding some native-mode 'q' and 'Q' tests,
got rid of unused code, and repaired a non-portable assumption about
native sizeof(short) (it isn't 2 on some Cray boxes).
libstruct.tex: In addition to adding a bit of 'q'/'Q' docs (more needed
later), removed an erroneous footnote about 'I' behavior.
code, less memory. Tests have uncovered no drawbacks. Christian and
Vladimir are the other two people who have burned many brain cells on the
dict code in recent years, and they like the approach too, so I'm checking
it in without further ado.
instead of multiplication to generate the probe sequence. The idea is
recorded in Python-Dev for Dec 2000, but that version is prone to rare
infinite loops.
The value is in getting *all* the bits of the hash code to participate;
and, e.g., this speeds up querying every key in a dict with keys
[i << 16 for i in range(20000)] by a factor of 500. Should be equally
valuable in any bad case where the high-order hash bits were getting
ignored.
Also wrote up some of the motivations behind Python's ever-more-subtle
hash table strategy.
*are* obsolete; three variables and the maketrans() function are not
(yet) obsolete.
Add a compensating warnings.filterwarnings() call to test_strop.py.
Add this to the NEWS.
elements when crunching a list, dict or tuple. Now takes linear time
instead -- huge speedup for even moderately large containers, and the
code is notably simpler too.
Added some basic "is the output correct?" tests to test_pprint.
The comment following used to say:
/* We use ~hash instead of hash, as degenerate hash functions, such
as for ints <sigh>, can have lots of leading zeros. It's not
really a performance risk, but better safe than sorry.
12-Dec-00 tim: so ~hash produces lots of leading ones instead --
what's the gain? */
That is, there was never a good reason for doing it. And to the contrary,
as explained on Python-Dev last December, it tended to make the *sum*
(i + incr) & mask (which is the first table index examined in case of
collison) the same "too often" across distinct hashes.
Changing to the simpler "i = hash & mask" reduced the number of string-dict
collisions (== # number of times we go around the lookup for-loop) from about
6 million to 5 million during a full run of the test suite (these are
approximate because the test suite does some random stuff from run to run).
The number of collisions in non-string dicts also decreased, but not as
dramatically.
Note that this may, for a given dict, change the order (wrt previous
releases) of entries exposed by .keys(), .values() and .items(). A number
of std tests suffered bogus failures as a result. For dicts keyed by
small ints, or (less so) by characters, the order is much more likely to be
in increasing order of key now; e.g.,
>>> d = {}
>>> for i in range(10):
... d[i] = i
...
>>> d
{0: 0, 1: 1, 2: 2, 3: 3, 4: 4, 5: 5, 6: 6, 7: 7, 8: 8, 9: 9}
>>>
Unfortunately. people may latch on to that in small examples and draw a
bogus conclusion.
test_support.py
Moved test_extcall's sortdict() into test_support, made it stronger,
and imported sortdict into other std tests that needed it.
test_unicode.py
Excluced cp875 from the "roundtrip over range(128)" test, because
cp875 doesn't have a well-defined inverse for unicode("?", "cp875").
See Python-Dev for excruciating details.
Cookie.py
Chaged various output functions to sort dicts before building
strings from them.
test_extcall
Fiddled the expected-result file. This remains sensitive to native
dict ordering, because, e.g., if there are multiple errors in a
keyword-arg dict (and test_extcall sets up many cases like that), the
specific error Python complains about first depends on native dict
ordering.
Allow module getattr and setattr to exploit string interning, via the
previously null module object tp_getattro and tp_setattro slots. Yields
a very nice speedup for things like random.random and os.path etc.
Fixed a half dozen ways in which general dict comparison could crash
Python (even cause Win98SE to reboot) in the presence of kay and/or
value comparison routines that mutate the dict during dict comparison.
Bugfix candidate.
d1 == d2 and d1 != d2 now work even if the keys and values in d1 and d2
don't support comparisons other than ==, and testing dicts for equality
is faster now (especially when inequality obtains).
NEEDS DOC CHANGES.
More AttributeErrors transmuted into TypeErrors, in test_b2.py, and,
again, this strikes me as a good thing.
This checkin completes the iterator generalization work that obviously
needed to be done. Can anyone think of others that should be changed?
NEEDS DOC CHANGES
A few more AttributeErrors turned into TypeErrors, but in test_contains
this time.
The full story for instance objects is pretty much unexplainable, because
instance_contains() tries its own flavor of iteration-based containment
testing first, and PySequence_Contains doesn't get a chance at it unless
instance_contains() blows up. A consequence is that
some_complex_number in some_instance
dies with a TypeError unless some_instance.__class__ defines __iter__ but
does not define __getitem__.
to string.join(), so that when the latter figures out in midstream that
it really needs unicode.join() instead, unicode.join() can actually get
all the sequence elements (i.e., there's no guarantee that the sequence
passed to string.join() can be iterated over *again* by unicode.join(),
so string.join() must not pass on the original sequence object anymore).
because PySequence_Fast() started working for free as soon as
PySequence_Tuple() learned how to work with iterators. For some reason
unicode.join() still doesn't work, though.
NEEDS DOC CHANGES.
This one surprised me! While I expected tuple() to be a no-brainer, turns
out it's actually dripping with consequences:
1. It will *allow* the popular PySequence_Fast() to work with any iterable
object (code for that not yet checked in, but should be trivial).
2. It caused two std tests to fail. This because some places used
PyTuple_Sequence() (the C spelling of tuple()) as an indirect way to test
whether something *is* a sequence. But tuple() code only looked for the
existence of sq->item to determine that, and e.g. an instance passed
that test whether or not it supported the other operations tuple()
needed (e.g., __len__). So some things the tests *expected* to fail
with an AttributeError now fail with a TypeError instead. This looks
like an improvement to me; e.g., test_coercion used to produce 559
TypeErrors and 2 AttributeErrors, and now they're all TypeErrors. The
error details are more informative too, because the places calling this
were *looking* for TypeErrors in order to replace the generic tuple()
"not a sequence" msg with their own more specific text, and
AttributeErrors snuck by that.
NEEDS DOC CHANGES.
Possibly contentious: The first time s.next() yields StopIteration (for
a given map argument s) is the last time map() *tries* s.next(). That
is, if other sequence args are longer, s will never again contribute
anything but None values to the result, even if trying s.next() again
could yield another result. This is the same behavior map() used to have
wrt IndexError, so it's the only way to be wholly backward-compatible.
I'm not a fan of letting StopIteration mean "try again later" anyway.
to no longer insist that len(seq) be defined.
NEEDS DOC CHANGES.
This is meant to be a model for how other functions of this ilk (max,
filter, etc) can be generalized similarly. Feel encouraged to grab your
favorite and convert it!
Note some cute consequences:
list(file) == file.readlines() == list(file.xreadlines())
list(dict) == dict.keys()
list(dict.iteritems()) = dict.items()
list(xrange(i, j, k)) == range(i, j, k)
must now initialize the extra field used by the weak-ref machinery to
NULL themselves, to avoid having to require PyObject_INIT() to check
if the type supports weak references and do it there. This causes less
work to be done for all objects (the type object does not need to be
consulted to check for the Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_WEAKREFS bit).
Add note about _symtable.
Add note that 'from ... import *' restriction may go away -- and move
the whole entry closer to the top, because it might bite people.
internal states. Put the old .seed() (which could only get at about
the square root of the # of possibilities) under the new name .whseed(),
for bit-level compatibility with older versions. This occurred to me
while reviewing effbot's book (he found himself stumbling over .seed()
more than once there ...).
- All constructors grow an optional argument `factory' which is a
callable used when new message instances are created by the next()
methods. Defaults to the rfc822.Message class.
- A new subclass of UnixMailbox is added, called PortableUnixMailbox.
It's identical to UnixMailbox, but uses a more portable test for
From_ delimiter lines. With PortableUnixMailbox, any line that
starts with "From " is considered a delimiter (this should really
check for two newlines before the F, but it doesn't.
got broken). Also added new method .jumpahead(N). This finally gives us
a semi-decent answer to how Python's RNGs can be used safely and efficiently
in multithreaded programs (although it requires the user to use the new
machinery!).
functionality of, whrandom.py. Also closes all the "XXX" todos in
random.py. New frequently-requested functions/methods getstate() and
setstate(). All exported functions are now bound methods of a hidden
instance. Killed all unintended exports. Updated the docs.
FRED: The more I fiddle the docs, the less I understand the exact
intended use of the \var, \code, \method tags. Please review critically.
GUIDO: See email. I updated NEWS as if whrandom were deprecated; I
think it should be.
Tim Peters
Guido van Rossum
Barry Warsaw
Fred Drake
Andrew M. Kuchling
Marc-André Lemburg
Jeremy Hylton
Martin v. Löwis
Steve Purcell
Neil Schemenauer
Jack Jansen
Mark Hammond
Moshe Zadka