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Diffstat (limited to 'Doc/whatsnew/whatsnew20.tex')
| -rw-r--r-- | Doc/whatsnew/whatsnew20.tex | 36 |
1 files changed, 29 insertions, 7 deletions
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? |