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authorAndrew M. Kuchling <amk@amk.ca>2000-06-10 02:41:46 (GMT)
committerAndrew M. Kuchling <amk@amk.ca>2000-06-10 02:41:46 (GMT)
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-rw-r--r--Doc/whatsnew/whatsnew20.tex36
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diff --git a/Doc/whatsnew/whatsnew20.tex b/Doc/whatsnew/whatsnew20.tex
index 2c00566..021455d 100644
--- a/Doc/whatsnew/whatsnew20.tex
+++ b/Doc/whatsnew/whatsnew20.tex
@@ -9,6 +9,11 @@
\section{Introduction}
+{\large This is a draft document; please report inaccuracies and
+omissions to the authors. \\
+XXX marks locations where fact-checking or rewriting is still needed.
+}
+
A new release of Python, version 1.6, will be released some time this
summer. Alpha versions are already available from
\url{http://www.python.org/1.6/}. This article talks about the
@@ -229,7 +234,7 @@ packages, and Solaris .pkg files have been discussed and are in
various stages of development.
All this is documented in a new manual, \textit{Distributing Python
-Modules}, that will be added to the basic set of Python documentation.
+Modules}, that joins the basic set of Python documentation.
% ======================================================================
\section{String Methods}
@@ -348,8 +353,12 @@ formatting precision than \function{str()}. \function{repr()} uses
\function{str()} uses ``%.12g'' as before. The effect is that
\function{repr()} may occasionally show more decimal places than
\function{str()}, for numbers
-XXX need example value here to demonstrate problem.
+For example, the number 8.1 can't be represented exactly in binary, so
+\code{repr(8.1)} is \code{'8.0999999999999996'}, while str(8.1) is
+\code{'8.1'}.
+%The \code{-X} command-line option, which turns all standard exceptions
+%into strings instead of classes, has been removed.
% ======================================================================
\section{Core Changes}
@@ -456,6 +465,12 @@ people writing C extension modules, or embedding a Python interpreter
in a larger application. If you aren't dealing with Python's C API,
you can safely skip this section.
+The version number of the Python C API was incremented, so C
+extensions compiled for 1.5.2 must be recompiled in order to work with
+1.6. On Windows, attempting to import a third party extension built
+for Python 1.5.x usually results in an immediate crash; there's not
+much we can do about this. (XXX can anyone tell me why it crashes?)
+
Users of Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module will be pleased to find
out that hooks have been added so that ExtensionClasses are now
supported by \function{isinstance()} and \function{issubclass()}.
@@ -572,6 +587,8 @@ the fetchability of a given URL. (Contributed by Skip Montanaro.)
checks Python source code for ambiguous indentation.
(Contributed by Tim Peters.)
+\item{\module{UserString}:} A base class useful for deriving objects that behave like strings.
+
\item{\module{winreg}:} An interface to the Windows registry.
\module{winreg} has been part of PythonWin since 1995, but now has
been added to the core distribution, and enhanced to support Unicode.
@@ -590,7 +607,8 @@ module)
% ======================================================================
\section{IDLE Improvements}
-XXX IDLE -- complete overhaul; what are the changes?
+XXX IDLE -- complete overhaul. I don't use IDLE; can anyone tell me
+what the changes are?
% ======================================================================
\section{Deleted and Deprecated Modules}
@@ -599,12 +617,16 @@ A few modules have been dropped because they're obsolete, or because
there are now better ways to do the same thing. The \module{stdwin}
module is gone; it was for a platform-independent windowing toolkit
that's no longer developed.
-The \module{cmp} and \module{dircmp} modules have been moved to the
-\file{lib-old} subdirectory;
-If you have code which relies on modules that have been moved to
+A number of modules have been moved to the
+\file{lib-old} subdirectory:
+\module{cmp}, \module{cmpcache}, \module{dircmp}, \module{dump},
+\module{find}, \module{grep}, \module{packmail},
+\module{poly}, \module{util}, \module{whatsound}, \module{zmod}.
+If you have code which relies on a module that's been moved to
\file{lib-old}, you can simply add that directory to \code{sys.path}
-to get them back.
+to get them back, but you're encouraged to update any code that uses
+these modules.
XXX any others deleted?