Another checkpoint -- reorganized, in sections.

1 files changed, 466 insertions, 427 deletions

diff --git a/Misc/NEWS b/Misc/NEWS
index d4cc9e9..6eb7719 100644
--- a/Misc/NEWS
+++ b/Misc/NEWS
@@ -1,154 +1,247 @@
+What's new in this release?
+===========================
 
+Below is a partial list of changes.  This list is much more detailed than 
+previous; however it is still not complete.  I did go through my CVS logs 
+but ran out of time.  I believe that at least all major changes are 
+actually noted here.  Note that I have not placed 
 
 
-New since 1.5a2
----------------
-
-The following items are only relevant if you previously used Python
-1.5a2:
-
-- The strftime test should now succeed on Windows and Mac platforms,
-too.  It still fails on some Linux platforms; I believe that this is a
-problem in the C library on those platforms.
-
-
-
-What's new in this release?
----------------------------
+Miscellaneous
+-------------
 
-I haven't kept track closely, so here are just a few highlights.  For
-the final release, I will go through all my RCS logs and distill a
-complete list.  Note that the biggest unfinished project is
-documentation.
+- The default module search path is now much saner.  Both on Unix and 
+Windows, it is essentially derived from the path to the executable which 
+can be overridden by setting the environment variable $PYTHONHOME).  The 
+value of $PYTHONPATH on Windows is now inserted in front of the default 
+path, like in Unix (instead of overriding the default path).  On Windows, 
+the directory containing the executable is added to the end of the path.
 
-XXX To be expanded:
+- The silly -s command line option and the corresponding
+PYTHONSUPPRESS environment variable (and the Py_SuppressPrint global
+flag in the Python/C API) are gone.
 
-- Tools/webchecker
+- Most problems on 64-bit platforms should now be fixed.  Andrew
+Kuchling helped.  Some uncommon extension modules are still not
+clean (image and audio ops?).
 
-- Lee Busby's SIGFPE mods and modules fpectl, fpetest
+- Fixed a bug where multiple anonymous tuple arguments would be mixed up
+when using the debugger or profiler (reported by Just van Rossum).
+The simplest example is ``def f((a,b),(c,d)): print a,b,c,d''; this
+would print the wrong value when run under the debugger or profiler.
 
-- formatter.*Writer.flush
+- Plugged the two-byte memory leak in the tokenizer when reading an
+interactive EOF.
 
-- dis.{cmp_op, hascompare}
 
-- ftplib: FTP.ntransfercmd, Netrc, parse150
+Performance
+-----------
 
-- httplib.HTTP_VERSIONS_ACCEPTED
+- It's much faster (almost twice for pystone.py -- see Tools/scripts).
 
-- new module keyword
+- Some speedup by using separate free lists for method objects (both
+the C and the Python variety) and for floating point numbers.
 
-- imghdr recognizes bmp, png
+- Big speedup by allocating frame objects with a single malloc() call.
+The Python/C API for frames is changed (you shouldn't be using this
+anyway).
 
-- mhlib, parsesequence improved
+- Significant speedup by inlining some common opcodes for common operand 
+types (e.g.  i+i, i-i, and list[i]).  Fredrik Lundh.
 
-- mimify base64 support
+- Small speedup by reordering the method tables of some common
+objects (e.g. list.append is now first).
 
-- new.function revived
 
-- popen2.popen3 added
+Documentation
+-------------
 
-- new module pprint
+- Many new pieces of library documentation were contributed, mostly by
+Andrew Kuchling.  Even cmath is now documented!  There's also a
+chapter of the library manual, "libundoc.tex", which provides a
+listing of all undocumented modules, plus their status (e.g. internal,
+obsolete, or in need of documentation).  Also contributions by Sue
+Williams, Skip Montanaro, and some module authors who succumbed to
+pressure to document their own contributed modules :-).  Note that
+printing the documentation now kills fewer trees -- the margins have
+been reduced.
 
-- cgi.FieldStorage: __len__ added
+- I have started documenting the Python/C API. Unfortunately this project 
+hasn't been completed yet.  It will be complete before the final release of 
+Python 1.5, though.  At the moment, it's better to read the LaTeX source 
+than to attempt to run it through LaTeX and print the resulting dvi file.
+
+- The posix module (and hence os.py) now has doc strings!  Thanks to Neil 
+Schemenauer.  I received a few other contributions of doc strings.  In most 
+other places, doc strings are still wishful thinking...
+
+
+Language changes
+----------------
+
+- Private variables with leading double underscore are now a permanent 
+feature of the language.  (These were experimental in release 1.4.  I have 
+favorable experience using them; I can't label them "experimental" 
+forever.)
+
+- There's new string literal syntax for "raw strings".  Prefixing a string 
+literal with the letter r (or R) disables all escape processing in the 
+string; for example, r'\n' is a two-character string consisting of a 
+backslash followed by the letter n.  This combines with all forms of string 
+quotes; it is actually useful for triple quoted doc strings which might 
+contain references to \n or \t.  An embedded quote prefixed with a 
+backslash does not terminate the string, but the backslash is still 
+included in the string; for example, r'\'' is a two-character string 
+consisting of a backslash and a quote.  (Raw strings are also 
+affectionately known as Robin strings, after their inventor, Robin 
+Friedrich.)
+
+- There's a simple assert statement, and a new exception AssertionError.  
+For example, ``assert foo > 0'' is equivalent to ``if not foo > 0: raise 
+AssertionError''.  Sorry, the text of the asserted condition is not 
+available; it would be too generate code for this.  However, the text is 
+displayed as part of the traceback!  There's also a -O option to the 
+interpreter that removes SET_LINENO instructions, assert statements; it 
+uses and produces .pyo files instead of .pyc files.  In the future it 
+should be possible to write external bytecode optimizers that create better 
+optimized .pyo files.  Without -O, the assert statement actually generates 
+code that first checks __debug__; if this variable is false, the assertion 
+is not checked.  __debug__ is a built-in variable whose value is 
+initialized to track the -O flag (it's true iff -O is not specified).  With 
+-O, no code is generated for assert statements, nor for code of the form 
+``if __debug__: <something>''.  Sorry, no further constant folding happens.
+
+
+Changes to builtin features
+---------------------------
 
-New exceptions:
-	FloatingPointError
-Deleted exception:
-	ConflictError
+- There's a new function sys.exc_info() which returns the tuple 
+(sys.exc_type, sys.exc_value, sys.exc_traceback) in a thread-safe way.
 
->    audioop.ratecv
+- There's a new variable sys.executable, pointing to the executable file 
+for the Python interpreter.
 
->     posix.O_APPEND
->     posix.O_CREAT
->     posix.O_DSYNC
->     posix.O_EXCL
->     posix.O_NDELAY
->     posix.O_NOCTTY
->     posix.O_NONBLOCK
->     posix.O_RDONLY
->     posix.O_RDWR
->     posix.O_RSYNC
->     posix.O_SYNC
->     posix.O_TRUNC
->     posix.O_WRONLY
-	posix.O_TEXT
-	posix.O_BINARY
-(also in os, of course)
+- The semantics of try-except have changed subtly so that calling a
+function in an exception handler that itself raises and catches an
+exception no longer overwrites the sys.exc_* variables.  This also
+alleviates the problem that objects referenced in a stack frame that
+caught an exception are kept alive until another exception is caught
+-- the sys.exc_* variables are restored to their previous value when
+returning from a function that caught an exception.
 
->     regex.get_syntax
+- There's a new "buffer" interface.  Certain objects (e.g. strings and
+arrays) now support the "buffer" protocol.  Buffer objects are acceptable 
+whenever formerly a string was required for a write operation; mutable 
+buffer objects can be the target of a read operation using the call
+f.readinto(buffer).  A cool feature is that regular expression matching now 
+also work on array objects.  Contribution by Jack Jansen.  (Needs 
+documentation.)
 
->     socket.getprotobyname
+- String interning: dictionary lookups are faster when the lookup
+string object is the same object as the key in the dictionary, not
+just a string with the same value.  This is done by having a pool of
+"interned" strings.  Most names generated by the interpreter are now
+automatically interned, and there's a new built-in function intern(s)
+that returns the interned version of a string.  Interned strings are
+not a different object type, and interning is totally optional, but by
+interning most keys a speedup of about 15% was obtained for the
+pystone benchmark.
 
->     strop.replace
-Also string.replace
+- Dictionary objects have several new methods; clear() and copy() have
+the obvious semantics, while update(d) merges the contents of another
+dictionary d into this one, overriding existing keys.  BTW, the
+dictionary implementation file is now called dictobject.c rather than
+the confusing mappingobject.c.
 
-- Jack's buffer interface!
-	- supported by regex module!
+- The sort() methods for lists no longer uses the C library qsort(); I
+wrote my own quicksort implementation, with help from Tim Peters.
+This solves a bug in dictionary comparisons on some Solaris versions
+when Python is built with threads, and makes sorting lists even
+faster.
 
-- improved dir() semantics
+- The intrinsic function dir() is much smarter; it looks in __dict__,
+__members__ and __methods__.
 
-- posix.error, nt.error renamed to os.error
+- When a module is deleted, its globals are now deleted in two phases.
+In the first phase, all variables whose name begins with exactly one
+underscore are replaced by None; in the second phase, all variables
+are deleted.  This makes it possible to have global objects whose
+destructors depend on other globals.  The deletion order within each
+phase is still random.
 
-- rfc822 getdate_tz and parsedate_tz
+- It is no longer an error for a function to be called without a
+global variable __builtins__ -- an empty directory will be provided
+by default.
 
-- shelve.*.sync
+- Guido's corollary to the "Don Beaudry hack": it is now possible to do
+metaprogramming by using an instance as a base class.  Not for the
+faint of heart; and undocumented as yet, but basically if a base class
+is an instance, its class will be instantiated to create the new
+class.  Jim Fulton will love it -- it also works with instances of his
+"extension classes", since it is triggered by the presence of a
+__class__ attribute on the purported base class.
 
-- shutil improved interface
 
-- socket.getprotobynameo
+New extension modules
+---------------------
 
-- _xdrmodule is gone (in favor of structmodule)
+- New extension modules cStringIO.c and cPickle.c, written by Jim
+Fulton and other folks at Digital Creations.  These are much more
+efficient than their Python counterparts StringIO.py and pickle.py,
+but don't support subclassing.  cPickle.c clocks up to 1000 times
+faster than pickle.py.  The pickle.py module has been updated to make
+it compatible with the new binary format that cPickle.c produces (by
+default it produces the old all-ASCII format compatible with the old
+pickle.py, still much faster than pickle.py; it can read both
+formats).  A new helper module, copy_reg.py, is provided to register
+extensions to the pickling code.  (These are now identical to the
+release 0.3 from Digital Creations.)
 
-- xdrlib.Unpacker.get_buffer
+- New extension module zlibmodule.c, interfacing to the free zlib
+library (gzip compatible compression).  There's also a module gzip.py
+which provides a higher level interface.  Written by Andrew Kuchling
+and Jeremy Hylton.
 
-- much improved structmodule
+- New module readline; see the "miscellaneous" section above.
 
-- Tkinter upgraded (as always)
+- New Unix extension module resource.c, by Jeremy Hylton, provides
+access to getrlimit(), getrusage(), setrusage(), getpagesize(), and
+related symbolic constants.
 
-- new al module for SGI
+- New extension puremodule.c, by Barry Warsaw, which interfaces to the
+Purify(TM) C API.  See also the file Misc/PURIFY.README.  It is also
+possible to enable Purify by simply setting the PURIFY Makefile
+variable in the Modules/Setup file.
 
-- file object readinto methods
 
-- tktrace???
+Changes in extension modules
+----------------------------
 
-Obsolete: cgensupport.[ch] are now in Modules and only linked with glmodule.c.
+- The struct extension module has several new features to control byte
+order and word size.  It supports reading and writing IEEE floats even
+on platforms where this is not the native format.
 
-- much faster file.read() and readlines() on windows
+- The fcntl extension module now exports the needed symbolic
+constants.  (Formerly these were in FCNTL.py which was not available
+or correct for all platforms.)
 
-======================================================================
+- The extension modules dbm, gdbm and bsddb now check that the
+database is still open before making any new calls.
 
-- PyObject_Compare() can now raise an exception.  Check with
-PyErr_Occurred().  The comparison function in an object type may also
-raise an exception.
+- Various modules now export their type object: socket.SocketType,
+array.ArrayType.
 
-- The slice interface uses an upper bound of INT_MAX when no explicit
-upper bound is given (e.x. for a[1:]).  It used to ask the object for
-its length and do the calculations.
+- The pthread support for the thread module now works on most platforms.
 
-- I've completed the Grand Renaming, with the help of Roger Masse and
-Barry Warsaw.  Many other unrelated code reorganizations have also
-been carried out.
+- STDWIN is now officially obsolete.  Support for it will eventually
+be removed from the distribution.
 
-- As far as I can tell, neither gcc -Wall nor the Microsoft compiler
-emits a single warning any more when compiling Python.
+- The binascii extension module is now hopefully fully debugged.  (XXX
+Oops -- Fredril Lundh promised me a fix that I never received.)
 
-- It's much faster (almost twice for pystone.py -- see Tools/scripts.)
 
-- Unless I hear a lot of protest, private variables with leading
-double underscore are now a permanent feature of the language.  I
-can't label them "experimental" forever.
-
-- New extension modules cStringIO.c and cPickle.c, written by Jim
-Fulton and other folks at Digital Creations.  These are much more
-efficient than their Python counterparts StringIO.py and pickle.py,
-but don't support subclassing.  cPickle.c clocks up to 1000 times
-faster than pickle.py.  The pickle.py module has been updated to make
-it compatible with the new binary format that cPickle.c produces (by
-default it produces the old all-ASCII format compatible with the old
-pickle.py, still much faster than pickle.py; it can read both
-formats).  A new helper module, copy_reg.py, is provided to register
-extensions to the pickling code.  (These are now identical to the
-release 0.3 from Digital Creations.)
+New library modules
+-------------------
 
 - New (still experimental) Perl-style regular expression module,
 re.py, which uses a new interface for matching as well as a new
@@ -159,94 +252,113 @@ Peters, and Andrew Kuchling.  See the documentation libre.tex.  In
 1.5, the old regex module is still fully supported; in the future, it
 will become obsolete.
 
-- New string literal syntax for "raw strings".  Prefixing a string
-literal with the letter r (or R) disables all escape processing in the
-string; for example, r'\n' is a two-character string consisting of a
-backslash followed by the letter n.  This combines with all forms of
-string quotes.  An embedded quote prefixed with a backslash does not
-terminate the string, but the backslash is still included in the
-string; for example, r'\'' is a two-character string consisting of a
-backslash and a quote.  Raw strings are also affectionately known as
-Robin strings, after their inventor, Robin Friedrich.
+- New module gzip.py; see zlib above.
 
-- New project files for Developer Studio (Visual C++) 5.0 for Windows
-NT (the old VC++ 4.2 Makefile is also still supported, but will
-eventually be withdrawn due to its bulkiness).
+- New module keyword.py exports knowledge about Python's built-in
+keywords.  (New version by Ka-Ping Yee.)
 
-- New extension module zlibmodule.c, interfacing to the free zlib
-library (gzip compatible compression).  There's also a module gzip.py
-which provides a higher level interface.  Written by Andrew Kuchling
-and Jeremy Hylton.
+- New module pprint.py (with documentation) which supports
+pretty-printing of lists, tuples, & dictionaries recursively.  By Fred
+Drake.
 
-- New tool: faqwiz -- the CGI script that is used to maintain the
-Python FAQ (http://grail.cnri.reston.va.us/cgi-bin/faqw.py).  In
-Tools/faqwiz.
+- New module code.py.  The function code.compile_command() can
+determine whether an interactively entered command is complete or not,
+distinguishing incomplete from invalid input.
 
-- New tool: webchecker -- a simple extensible web robot that, when
-aimed at a web server, checks that server for dead links.  Available
-are a command line utility as well as a Tkinter based GUI version.  In
-Tools/webchecker.  A simplified version of this program is dissected
-in my article in O'Reilly's WWW Journal, the issue on Scripting
-Languages (Vol 2, No 2); Scripting the Web with Python (pp 97-120).
-Includes a parser for robots.txt files by Skip Montanaro.
+- There is now a library module xdr.py which can read and write the
+XDR data format as used by Sun RPC, for example.  It uses the struct
+module.
 
-- New small tools: cvsfiles.py (prints a list of all files under CVS
-in a particular directory tree), treesync.py (a rather Guido-specific
-script to synchronize two source trees, one on Windows NT, the other
-one on Unix under CVS but accessible from the NT box), and logmerge.py
-(sort a collection of RCS or CVS logs by date).  In Tools/scripts.
 
-- The freeze script now also works under Windows (NT).  Another
-feature allows the -p option to be pointed at the Python source tree
-instead of the installation prefix.  This was loosely based on part of
-xfreeze by Sam Rushing and Bill Tutt.
+Changes in library modules
+--------------------------
 
-- A new regression test suite is provided, which tests most of the
-standard and built-in modules.  The regression test is run by invoking
-the script Lib/test/regrtest.py.  Barry Warsaw wrote the test harnass;
-he and Roger Masse contributed most of the new tests.
+- Module codehack.py is now completely obsolete.
 
-- New standard dialog modules for Tkinter: tkColorChooser.py,
-tkCommonDialog.py, tkMessageBox.py, tkFileDialog.py, tkSimpleDialog.py
-These interface with the new Tk dialog scripts.  Contributed by
-Fredrik Lundh.
+- Revamped module tokenize.py is much more accurate and has an
+interface that makes it a breeze to write code to colorize Python
+source code.  Contributed by Ka-Ping Yee.
 
-- Tkinter.py: when the first Tk object is destroyed, it sets the
-hiddel global _default_root to None, so that when another Tk object is
-created it becomes the new default root.  Other miscellaneous
-changes and fixes.
+- In ihooks.py, ModuleLoader.load_module() now closes the file under
+all circumstances.
 
-- Many new pieces of library documentation were contributed, mostly by
-Andrew Kuchling.  Even cmath is now documented!  There's also a
-chapter of the library manual, "libundoc.tex", which provides a
-listing of all undocumented modules, plus their status (e.g. internal,
-obsolete, or in need of documentation).  Also contributions by Sue
-Williams, Skip Montanaro, and some module authors who succumbed to
-pressure to document their own contributed modules :-).  Note that
-printing the documentation now kills fewer trees -- the margins have
-been reduced.
+- The tempfile.py module has a new class, TemporaryFile, which creates
+an open temporary file that will be deleted automatically when
+closed.  This works on Windows and MacOS as well as on Unix.  (Jim
+Fulton.)
+
+- Changes to the cgi.py module: Most imports are now done at the
+top of the module, which provides a speedup when using ni (Jim
+Fulton).  The problem with file upload to a Windows platform is solved
+by using the new tempfile.TemporaryFile class; temporary files are now
+always opened in binary mode (Jim Fulton).  The cgi.escape() function
+now takes an optional flag argument that quotes '"' to '&quot;'.  It
+is now possible to invoke cgi.py from a command line script, to test
+cgi scripts more easily outside an http server.  There's an optional
+limit to the size of uploads to POST (Skip Montanaro).  Added a
+'strict_parsing' option to all parsing functions (Jim Fulton).  The
+function parse_qs() now uses urllib.unquote() on the name as well as
+the value of fields (Clarence Gardner).
+
+- httplib.py: the socket object is no longer closed; all HTTP/1.*
+versions are now treated the same; and it is now thread-safe (by not
+using the regex module).
+
+- BaseHTTPModule.py: treat all HTTP/1.* versions the same.
+
+- The popen2.py module is now rewritten using a class, which makes
+access to the standard error stream and the process id of the
+subprocess possible.
+
+- Added timezone support to the rfc822.py module; also added
+recognition of some non-standard date formats, by Lars Wirzenius.
+
+- mhlib.py: various enhancements, including almost compatible parsing
+of message sequence specifiers without invoking a subprocess.  Also
+added a createmessage() method by Lars Wirzenius.
 
-- I have started documenting the Python/C API.  Unfortunately this
-project hasn't been completed yet.  It will be complete before the
-final release of Python 1.5, though.
+- The StringIO.StringIO class now supports readline(nbytes).  (Lars 
+Wirzenius.)  (Of course, you should be using cStringIO for performance.)
 
-- The mimify.py module now has documentation, and includes functions
-to handle the funny encoding you sometimes see in mail headers.
+- UserDict.py supports the new dictionary methods as well.
 
-- The default module search path is now much saner.  Both on Unix and
-Windows, it is essentially derived from the path to the executable
-($PYTHONHOME can be used to override).  The value of $PYTHONPATH on
-Windows is now inserted in front of the default path, like in Unix
-(instead of overriding the default path).
+- Improvements for whrandom.py by Tim Peters: use 32-bit arithmetic to
+speed it up, and replace 0 seed values by 1 to avoid degeneration.
 
-- Support for Win32S (the 32-bit Windows API under Windows 3.1) is
-basically withdrawn.  If it works for you, you're lucky.
+- Module ftplib.py: added support for parsing a .netrc file.  Fred
+Drake.
 
-- On Win32 platforms (Windows NT and 95), there's a new extension
-module, msvcrt.c, which provides various low-level operations defined
-in the Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library.  These include locking(),
-setmode(), get_osfhandle(), set_osfhandle(), and console I/O functions
-like kbhit(), getch() and putch().
+- urllib.py: the ftp cache is now limited to 10 entries.  Added
+quote_plus() method which is like qupte() but also replaces spaces
+with '+', for encoding CGI form arguments.  Catch all errors from the
+ftp module.  HTTP requests now add the Host: header line.  The proxy
+variable names are now mapped to lower case, for Windows.
+
+- shelve.py: use cPickle and cStringIO when available.
+
+- The mimetools.py module now uses the available Python modules for
+decoding quoted-printable, uuencode and base64 formats, rather than
+creating a subprocess.
+
+- The python debugger (pdb.py, and its base class bdb.py) now support
+conditional breakpoints.  See the docs.
+
+- The modules base64.py, uu.py and quopri.py can now be used as simple
+command line utilities.
+
+- Various small fixes to the nntplib.py module that I can't bother to
+document in detail.
+
+- There is a cache for results in urlparse.urlparse(); its size limit
+is set to 20 (not 2000 as it was in earlier alphas).
+
+- Sjoerd Mullender's mimify.py module now supports base64 encoding and 
+includes functions to handle the funny encoding you sometimes see in mail 
+headers.  It is now documented.
+
+
+Changes to the build process
+----------------------------
 
 - The way GNU readline is configured is totally different.  The
 --with-readline configure option is gone.  It is now an extension
@@ -259,9 +371,54 @@ input mechanism is used.  The hook variables are PyOS_InputHook and
 PyOS_ReadlineFunctionPointer.  (Code contributed by Lee Busby, with
 ideas from William Magro.)
 
-- New Unix extension module resource.c, by Jeremy Hylton, provides
-access to getrlimit(), getrusage(), setrusage(), getpagesize(), and
-related symbolic constants.
+- New build procedure: a single library, libpython1.5.a, is now built,
+which contains absolutely everything except for a one-line main()
+program (which calls Py_Main(argc, argv) to start the interpreter
+shell).  This makes life much simpler for applications that need to
+embed Python.  The serial number of the build is now included in the
+version string (sys.version).
+
+- As far as I can tell, neither gcc -Wall nor the Microsoft compiler
+emits a single warning any more when compiling Python.
+
+- A set of patches from Lee Busby has been integrated that make it
+possible to catch floating point exceptions.  Use the configure option
+--with-fpectl to enable the patches; the extension modules fpectl and
+fpetest provide control to enable/disable and test the feature,
+respectively.
+
+- The support for shared libraries under AIX is now simpler and more
+robust.  Thanks to Vladimir Marangozov for revamping his own patches!
+
+- The Modules/makesetup script now reads a file Setup.local as well as
+a file Setup.  Most changes to the Setup script can be done by editing
+Setup.local instead, which makes it easier to carry a particular setup
+over from one release to the next.
+
+- The configure script is smarter about C compiler options; e.g. with
+gcc it uses -O2 and -g when possible, and on some other platforms it
+uses -Olimit 1500 to avoid a warning from the optimizer about the main
+loop in ceval.c (which has more than 1000 basic blocks).
+
+- The configure script now detects whether malloc(0) returns a NULL
+pointer or a valid block (of length zero).  This avoids the nonsense
+of always adding one byte to all malloc() arguments on most platforms.
+
+
+Change to the Python/C API
+--------------------------
+
+- I've completed the Grand Renaming, with the help of Roger Masse and Barry 
+Warsaw.  This makes reading or debugging the code much easier.  Many other 
+unrelated code reorganizations have also been carried out.
+
+- PyObject_Compare() can now raise an exception.  Check with
+PyErr_Occurred().  The comparison function in an object type may also
+raise an exception.
+
+- The slice interface uses an upper bound of INT_MAX when no explicit
+upper bound is given (e.x. for a[1:]).  It used to ask the object for
+its length and do the calculations.
 
 - Support for multiple independent interpreters.  See Doc/api.tex,
 functions Py_NewInterpreter() and Py_EndInterpreter().  Since the
@@ -283,17 +440,6 @@ exit()).
 calls to Py_Finalize() and Py_Initialize() do not create unaccessible
 heap blocks.
 
-- New function sys.exc_info() returns the tuple (sys.exc_type,
-sys.exc_value, sys.exc_traceback) in a thread-safe way.
-
-- The semantics of try-except have changed subtly so that calling a
-function in an exception handler that itself raises and catches an
-exception no longer overwrites the sys.exc_* variables.  This also
-alleviates the problem that objects referenced in a stack frame that
-caught an exception are kept alive until another exception is caught
--- the sys.exc_* variables are restored to their previous value when
-returning from a function that caught an exception.
-
 - There is now explicit per-thread state.  (Inspired by, but not the
 same as, Greg Stein's free threading patches.)
 
@@ -308,78 +454,42 @@ just malloc().  Use of these wrappers could be essential if multiple
 memory allocators exist (e.g. when using certain DLL setups under
 Windows).  (Idea by Jim Fulton.)
 
-- Numerous source cleanups.
-
-- There's a simple assert statement, and a new exception
-AssertionError, and a built-in variable __debug__.  For example,
-``assert foo > 0'' is equivalent to ``if __debug__ and not foo > 0:
-raise AssertionError''.  Sorry, the text of the asserted condition is
-not available; it would be too generate code for this.  However, the
-text is displayed as part of the traceback!  There's also a -O option
-to the interpreter that squeezes SET_LINENO instructions, assert
-statements and ``if __debug__'' code; it uses and produces .pyo files
-instead of .pyc files.  In the future it should be possible to write
-external bytecode optimizers that create better optimized .pyo files.
-
-- New build procedure: a single library, libpython1.5.a, is now built,
-which contains absolutely everything except for a one-line main()
-program (which calls Py_Main(argc, argv) to start the interpreter
-shell).  This makes life much simpler for applications that need to
-embed Python.  The serial number of the build is now included in the
-version string (sys.version).
-
-- New module keyword.py exports knowledge about Python's built-in
-keywords.  (New version by Ka-Ping Yee.)
-
-- New examples (Demo/extend) that show how to use the generic
-extension makefile (Misc/Makefile.pre.in).
-
-- New module pprint.py (with documentation) which supports
-pretty-printing of lists, tuples, & dictionaries recursively.  By Fred
-Drake.
-
-- New module code.py.  The function code.compile_command() can
-determine whether an interactively entered command is complete or not,
-distinguishing incomplete from invalid input.
-
-- Module codehack.py is now completely obsolete.
+- New C API PyImport_Import() which uses whatever __import__() hook
+that is installed for the current execution environment.  By Jim
+Fulton.
 
-- Revamped module tokenize.py is much more accurate and has an
-interface that makes it a breeze to write code to colorize Python
-source code.  Contributed by Ka-Ping Yee.
+- It is now possible for an extension module's init function to fail
+non-fatally, by calling one of the PyErr_* functions and returning.
 
-- As always, the Macintosh port was done by Jack Jansen.  See his
-separate announcement for the Mac specific source code and the binary
-distribution(s).
+- The PyInt_AS_LONG() and PyFloat_AS_DOUBLE() macros now cast their
+argument to the proper type, like the similar PyString macros already
+did.  (Suggestion by Marc-Andre Lemburg.)
 
-- A set of patches from Lee Busby has been integrated that make it
-possible to catch floating point exceptions.  Use the configure option
---with-fpectl to enable the patches; the extension modules fpectl and
-fpetest provide control to enable/disable and test the feature,
-respectively.
+- Some of the Py_Get* function, like Py_GetVersion() (but not yet
+Py_GetPath()) are now declared as returning a const char *.  (More
+should follow.)
 
-- New extension puremodule.c, by Barry Warsaw, which interfaces to the
-Purify(TM) C API.  See also the file Misc/PURIFY.README.  It is also
-possible to enable Purify by simply setting the PURIFY Makefile
-variable in the Modules/Setup file.
+- Changed the run-time library to check for exceptions after object
+comparisons.  PyObject_Compare() can now return an exception; use
+PyErr_Occurred() to check (there is *no* special return value).
 
-- The struct extension module has several new features to control byte
-order and word size.  It supports reading and writing IEEE floats even
-on platforms where this is not the native format.
+- PyFile_WriteString() and Py_Flushline() now return error indicators
+instead of clearing exceptions.  This fixes an obscure bug where using
+these would clear a pending exception, discovered by Just van Rossum.
 
-- There is now a library module xdr.py which can read and write the
-XDR data format as used by Sun RPC, for example.  It uses the struct
-module.
 
-- Tools/scripts/h2py.py now supports C++ comments.
+Tkinter
+-------
 
-- The pystone.py script is upgraded to version 1.1; there was a bug in
-version 1.0 (distributed with Python 1.4) that leaked memory.  Also,
-in 1.1, the LOOPS variable is incremented to 10000.
+- New standard dialog modules for Tkinter: tkColorChooser.py,
+tkCommonDialog.py, tkMessageBox.py, tkFileDialog.py, tkSimpleDialog.py
+These interface with the new Tk dialog scripts.  Contributed by
+Fredrik Lundh.
 
-- New C API PyImport_Import() which uses whatever __import__() hook
-that is installed for the current execution environment.  By Jim
-Fulton.
+- Tkinter.py: when the first Tk object is destroyed, it sets the
+hiddel global _default_root to None, so that when another Tk object is
+created it becomes the new default root.  Other miscellaneous
+changes and fixes.
 
 - The _tkinter.c extension module has been revamped.  It now support
 Tk versions 4.1 through 8.0; support for 4.0 has been dropped.  It
@@ -394,225 +504,154 @@ will have to rethink how to interface with Tcl's lower-level event
 mechanism, or with its channels (which are like Python's file-like
 objects).
 
-- New "buffer" interface.  Certain objects (e.g. strings, arrays) now
-support the "buffer" protocol.  Buffer objects are acceptable whenever
-formerly a string was required for a write operation; mutable buffer
-objects can be the target of a read operation using the
-f.readinto(buffer).  Contribution bty Jack Jansen.  (Needs
-documentation.)
-
-- In ihooks.py, ModuleLoader.load_module() now closes the file under
-all circumstances.
-
-- The tempfile.py module has a new class, TemporaryFile, which creates
-an open temporary file that will be deleted automatically when
-closed.  This works on Windows and MacOS as well as on Unix.  (Jim
-Fulton.)
-
-- Changes to the cgi.py module: Most imports are now done at the
-top of the module, which provides a speedup when using ni (Jim
-Fulton).  The problem with file upload to a Windows platform is solved
-by using the new tempfile.TemporaryFile class; temporary files are now
-always opened in binary mode (Jim Fulton).  The cgi.escape() function
-now takes an optional flag argument that quotes '"' to '&quot;'.  It
-is now possible to invoke cgi.py from a command line script, to test
-cgi scripts more easily outside an http server.  There's an optional
-limit to the size of uploads to POST (Skip Montanaro).  Added a
-'strict_parsing' option to all parsing functions (Jim Fulton).  The
-function parse_qs() now uses urllib.unquote() on the name as well as
-the value of fields (Clarence Gardner).
 
-- String interning: dictionary lookups are faster when the lookup
-string object is the same object as the key in the dictionary, not
-just a string with the same value.  This is done by having a pool of
-"interned" strings.  Most names generated by the interpreter are now
-automatically interned, and there's a new built-in function intern(s)
-that returns the interned version of a string.  Interned strings are
-not a different object type, and interning is totally optional, but by
-interning most keys a speedup of about 15% was obtained for the
-pystone benchmark.
-
-- httplib.py: the socket object is no longer closed; all HTTP/1.*
-versions are now treated the same; and it is now thread-safe (by not
-using the regex module).
-
-- BaseHTTPModule.py: treat all HTTP/1.* versions the same.
-
-- The popen2.py module is now rewritten using a class, which makes
-access to the standard error stream and the process id of the
-subprocess possible.
-
-- The support for shared libraries under AIX is now simpler and more
-robust.  Thanks to Vladimir Marangozov for revamping his own patches!
+Tools and Demos
+---------------
 
-- When a module is deleted, its globals are now deleted in two phases.
-In the first phase, all variables whose name begins with exactly one
-underscore are replaced by None; in the second phase, all variables
-are deleted.  This makes it possible to have global objects whose
-destructors depend on other globals.  The deletion order within each
-phase is still random.
+- A new regression test suite is provided, which tests most of the
+standard and built-in modules.  The regression test is run by invoking
+the script Lib/test/regrtest.py.  Barry Warsaw wrote the test harnass;
+he and Roger Masse contributed most of the new tests.
 
-- The Modules/makesetup script now reads a file Setup.local as well as
-a file Setup.  Most changes to the Setup script can be done by editing
-Setup.local instead, which makes it easier to carry a particular setup
-over from one release to the next.
+- New tool: faqwiz -- the CGI script that is used to maintain the
+Python FAQ (http://grail.cnri.reston.va.us/cgi-bin/faqw.py).  In
+Tools/faqwiz.
 
-- It is no longer an error for a function to be called without a
-global variable __builtins__ -- an empty directory will be provided
-by default.
+- New tool: webchecker -- a simple extensible web robot that, when
+aimed at a web server, checks that server for dead links.  Available
+are a command line utility as well as a Tkinter based GUI version.  In
+Tools/webchecker.  A simplified version of this program is dissected
+in my article in O'Reilly's WWW Journal, the issue on Scripting
+Languages (Vol 2, No 2); Scripting the Web with Python (pp 97-120).
+Includes a parser for robots.txt files by Skip Montanaro.
 
-- Some speedup by using separate free lists for method objects (both
-the C and the Python variety) and for floating point numbers.
+- New small tools: cvsfiles.py (prints a list of all files under CVS
+in a particular directory tree), treesync.py (a rather Guido-specific
+script to synchronize two source trees, one on Windows NT, the other
+one on Unix under CVS but accessible from the NT box), and logmerge.py
+(sort a collection of RCS or CVS logs by date).  In Tools/scripts.
 
-- Big speedup by allocating frame objects with a single malloc() call.
-The Python/C API for frames is changed (you shouldn't be using this
-anyway).
+- The freeze script now also works under Windows (NT).  Another
+feature allows the -p option to be pointed at the Python source tree
+instead of the installation prefix.  This was loosely based on part of
+xfreeze by Sam Rushing and Bill Tutt.
 
-- It is now possible for an extension module's init function to fail
-non-fatally, by calling one of the PyErr_* functions and returning.
+- New examples (Demo/extend) that show how to use the generic
+extension makefile (Misc/Makefile.pre.in).
 
-- The PyInt_AS_LONG() and PyFloat_AS_DOUBLE() macros now cast their
-argument to the proper type, like the similar PyString macros already
-did.  (Suggestion by Marc-Andre Lemburg.)
+- Tools/scripts/h2py.py now supports C++ comments.
 
-- The fcntl extension module now exports the needed symbolic
-constants.  (Formerly these were in FCNTL.py which was not available
-or correct for all platforms.)
+- The pystone.py script is upgraded to version 1.1; there was a bug in
+version 1.0 (distributed with Python 1.4) that leaked memory.  Also,
+in 1.1, the LOOPS variable is incremented to 10000.
 
-- Guido's corollary of the Don Beaudry hack: it is now possible to do
-metaprogramming by using an instance as a base class.  Not for the
-faint of heart; and undocumented as yet, but basically if a base class
-is an instance, its class will be instantiated to create the new
-class.  Jim Fulton will love it -- it also works with instances of his
-"extension classes", since it is triggered by the presence of a
-__class__ attribute on the purported base class.
 
-- Plugged the two-byte memory leak in the tokenizer when reading an
-interactive EOF.
+Windows (NT and 95)
+-------------------
 
-- Added timezone support to the rfc822.py module; also added
-recognition of some non-standard date formats, by Lars Wirzenius.
+- New project files for Developer Studio (Visual C++) 5.0 for Windows
+NT (the old VC++ 4.2 Makefile is also still supported, but will
+eventually be withdrawn due to its bulkiness).
 
-- mhlib.py: various enhancements, including almost compatible parsing
-of message sequence specifiers without invoking a subprocess.  Also
-added a createmessage() method by Lars Wirzenius.
+- See the note on the new module search path in the "Miscellaneous" section 
+above.
 
-- The StringIO.StringIO class now supports readline(nbytes).  (Lars
-Wirzenius.)
+- Support for Win32s (the 32-bit Windows API under Windows 3.1) is
+basically withdrawn.  If it still works for you, you're lucky.
 
-- Dictionary objects have several new methods; clear() and copy() have
-the obvious semantics, while update(d) merges the contents of another
-dictionary d into this one, overriding existing keys.  BTW, the
-dictionary implementation file is now called dictobject.c rather than
-the confusing mappingobject.c.
+- There's a new extension module, msvcrt.c, which provides various 
+low-level operations defined in the Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library.  
+These include locking(), setmode(), get_osfhandle(), set_osfhandle(), and 
+console I/O functions like kbhit(), getch() and putch().
 
-- UserDict.py supports the new dictionary methods as well.
+- The -u option not only sets the standard I/O streams to unbuffered 
+status, but also sets them in binary mode.
 
-- The intrinsic function dir() is much smarter; it looks in __dict__,
-__members__ and __methods__.
+- The, sys.prefix and sys.exec_prefix variables point to the directory 
+where Python is installed, or to the top of the source tree, if it was run 
+from there.
 
-- The silly -s command line option and the corresponding
-PYTHONSUPPRESS environment variable and the Py_SuppressPrint global
-flag are gone.
+- The ntpath module (normally used as os.path) supports ~ to $HOME 
+expansion in expanduser().
 
-- On Windows, -u not only sets the standard I/O streams to unbuffered
-status, but also sets them in binary mode.
+- The freeze tool now works on Windows.
 
-- Some of the Py_Get* function, like Py_GetVersion() (but not yet
-Py_GetPath()) are now declared as returning a const char *.  (More
-should follow.)
+- See also the Tkinter category for a note on _tkinter.createfilehandler().
 
-- Speedup by inlining some common opcodes for common operand types
-(e.g. i+i, i-i, and list[i]).  Fredrik Lundh.
 
-- The extension modules dbm, gdbm and bsddb now check that the
-database is still open before making any new calls.
+Mac
+---
 
-- Various small fixes to the nntplib.py module that I can't bother to
-document in detail.
+- As always, the Macintosh port was done by Jack Jansen.  See his
+separate announcement for the Mac specific source code and the binary
+distribution(s).
 
-- There is a cache for results in urlparse.urlparse(); its size limit
-is set to 20 (not 2000 as it was in earlier alphas).
 
-- Small speedup by reordering the method tables of some common
-objects (e.g. list.append is now first).
+More
+----
 
-- The modules base64.py, uu.py and quopri.py can now be used as simple
-command line utilities.
+The following items should be expanded upon:
 
-- The binascii extension module is now hopefully fully debugged.  (XXX
-Oops -- Fredril Lundh promised me a fix that I never received.)
+- formatter.*Writer.flush
 
-- The mimetools.py module now uses the available Python modules for
-decoding quoted-printable, uuencode and base64 formats, rather than
-creating a subprocess.
+- dis.{cmp_op, hascompare}
 
-- The python debugger (pdb.py, and its base class bdb.py) now support
-conditional breakpoints.  See the docs.
+- ftplib: FTP.ntransfercmd, parse150
 
-- The configure script now detects whether malloc(0) returns a NULL
-pointer or a valid block (of length zero).  This avoids the nonsense
-of always adding one byte to all malloc() arguments on most platforms.
+- imghdr recognizes bmp, png
 
-- Improvements for whrandom.py by Tim Peters: use 32-bit arithmetic to
-speed it up, and replace 0 seed values by 1 to avoid degeneration.
+- mimify base64 support
 
-- Fix a bug where multiple anonymous tuple arguments would be mixed up
-when using the debugger or profiler (reported by Just van Rossum).
-The simplest example is ``def f((a,b),(c,d)): print a,b,c,d''; this
-would print the wrong value when run under the debugger or profiler.
+- new.function revived
 
-- Module ftplib.py: added support for parsing a .netrc file.  Fred
-Drake.
+- cgi.FieldStorage: __len__ added
 
-- urllib.py: the ftp cache is now limited to 10 entries.  Added
-quote_plus() method which is like qupte() but also replaces spaces
-with '+', for encoding CGI form arguments.  Catch all errors from the
-ftp module.  HTTP requests now add the Host: header line.  The proxy
-variable names are now mapped to lower case, for Windows.
+New exceptions:
+	FloatingPointError
+Deleted exception:
+	ConflictError
 
-- The posix module (and hence os.py!) now has doc strings!  Thanks to
-Neil Schemenauer.
+>    audioop.ratecv
 
-- shelve.py: use cPickle and cStringIO when available.
+>     posix.O_APPEND
+>     posix.O_CREAT
+>     posix.O_DSYNC
+>     posix.O_EXCL
+>     posix.O_NDELAY
+>     posix.O_NOCTTY
+>     posix.O_NONBLOCK
+>     posix.O_RDONLY
+>     posix.O_RDWR
+>     posix.O_RSYNC
+>     posix.O_SYNC
+>     posix.O_TRUNC
+>     posix.O_WRONLY
+	posix.O_TEXT
+	posix.O_BINARY
+(also in os, of course)
 
-- Various modules now export their type object: socket.SocketType,
-array.ArrayType.
+>     regex.get_syntax
 
-- ntpath.py supports ~ to $HOME expansion in expanduser().
+>     socket.getprotobyname
 
-- The pthread support now works on most platforms.
+>     strop.replace
+Also string.replace
 
-- New variable sys.executable points to the executable file for the
-Python interpreter, if known.
+- Jack's buffer interface!
+	- supported by regex module!
 
-- On Windows, sys.prefix and sys.exec_prefix point to the directory
-where Python is installed, or to the top of the source tree, if it was
-run from there.
+- posix.error, nt.error renamed to os.error
 
-- The sort() methods for lists no longer uses the C library qsort(); I
-wrote my own quicksort implementation, with help from Tim Peters.
-This solves a bug in dictionary comparisons on some Solaris versions
-when Python is built with threads, and makes sorting lists even
-faster.
+- rfc822 getdate_tz and parsedate_tz
 
-- STDWIN is now officially obsolete.  Support for it will eventually
-be removed from the distribution.
+- shelve.*.sync
 
-- The configure script is smarter about C compiler options; e.g. with
-gcc it uses -O2 and -g when possible, and on some other platforms it
-uses -Olimit 1500 to avoid a warning from the optimizer about the main
-loop in ceval.c (which has more than 1000 basic blocks).
+- shutil improved interface
 
-- Changed the run-time library to check for exceptions after object
-comparisons.  PyObject_Compare() can now return an exception; use
-PyErr_Occurred() to check (there is *no* special return value).
+- socket.getprotobynameo
 
-- PyFile_WriteString() and Py_Flushline() now return error indicators
-instead of clearing exceptions.  This fixes an obscure bug where using
-these would clear a pending exception, discovered by Just van Rossum.
+- new al module for SGI
 
-- Most problems on 64-bit platforms should now be fixed.  Andrew
-Kuchling helped.  Some uncommon extension modules are still not
-clean (image and audio ops?).
+Obsolete: cgensupport.[ch] are now in Modules and only linked with glmodule.c.
 
+- much faster file.read() and readlines() on windows