path: root/Misc/NEWS

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.  Some changes made beteen Oct 1996 and April 1997
have not yet been noted.


Miscellaneous
-------------

- 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.

- On Unix, when using sys.argv[0] to insert the script directory in
front of sys.path, expand a symbolic link.  You can now install a
program in a private directory and have a symbolic link to it in a
public bin directory, and it will put the private directory in the
module search path.  Note that the symlink is expanded in sys.path[0]
but not in sys.argv[0], so you can still tell the name by which you
were invoked.

- It is now recommended to use ``#!/usr/bin/env python'' instead of
``#!/usr/local/bin/python'' at the start of executable scripts, except
for CGI scripts.  It has been determined that the use of /usr/bin/env
is more portable than that of /usr/local/bin/python -- scripts almost
never have to be edited when the Python interpreter lives in a
non-standard place.  Note that this doesn't work for CGI scripts since
the python executable often doesn't live in the HTTP server's default
search path.

- 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.

- 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?).

- 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.

- 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.

- The hacks that the dictionary implementation used to speed up
repeated lookups of the same C string were removed; these were a
source of subtle problems and don't seem to serve much of a purpose
any longer.

- All traces of support for the long dead access statement have been
removed from the sources.

- Plugged the two-byte memory leak in the tokenizer when reading an
interactive EOF.


Performance
-----------

- It's much faster (almost twice for pystone.py -- see
Tools/scripts).  See the entry on string interning below.

- Some speedup by using separate free lists for method objects (both
the C and the Python variety) and for floating point numbers.

- 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).

- Significant speedup by inlining some common opcodes for common operand 
types (e.g.  i+i, i-i, and list[i]).  Fredrik Lundh.

- Small speedup by reordering the method tables of some common
objects (e.g. list.append is now first).

- Big optimization to the read() method of file objects.  A read()
without arguments now attempts to use fstat to allocate a buffer of
the right size; for pipes and sockets, it will fall back to doubling
the buffer size.  While that the improvement is real on all systems,
it is most dramatic on Windows.


Documentation
-------------

- 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.

- 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 (the line numbers are still available in the .pyo file, as a
separate table; but the removal of the SET_LINENO instructions means
that the debugger can't set breakpoints on lines in -O mode).  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
---------------------------

- There's a new exception FloatingPointError (used only by Lee Busby's
patches to catch floating point exceptions, at the moment).

- The obsolete exception ConflictError has been deleted.

- 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.

- There's a new variable sys.executable, pointing to the executable file 
for the Python interpreter.

- 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'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.)

- 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.

- 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.

- The intrinsic function dir() is much smarter; it looks in __dict__,
__members__ and __methods__.

- The intrinsic functions int(), long() and float() can now take a
string argument and then do the same thing as string.atoi(),
string.atol(), and string.atof().  No second 'base' argument is
allowed, and complex() does not take a string (nobody cared enough).

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- New optional parameter to the readlines() method of file objects.
This indicates the number of bytes to read (the actual number of bytes
read will be somewhat larger due to buffering reading until the end of
the line).  Some optimizations have also been made to speed it up (but
not as much as read()).


New extension modules
---------------------

- 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; cStringIO.c's improvement is less dramatic but
still significant.  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 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 readline; see the "miscellaneous" section above.

- New Unix extension module resource.c, by Jeremy Hylton, provides
access to getrlimit(), getrusage(), setrusage(), getpagesize(), and
related symbolic constants.

- 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.


Changes in extension modules
----------------------------

- 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.

- 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.

- Various modules now export their type object: socket.SocketType,
array.ArrayType.

- The socket module's accept() method now returns unknown addresses as
a tuple rather than raising an exception.  (This can happen in
promiscuous mode.)  Theres' also a new function getprotobyname().

- The pthread support for the thread module now works on most platforms.

- STDWIN is now officially obsolete.  Support for it will eventually
be removed from the distribution.

- The binascii extension module is now hopefully fully debugged.  (XXX
Oops -- Fredril Lundh promised me a fix that I never received.)

- audioop.c: added a ratecv method

- posixmodule.c: now exports the O_* flags (O_APPEND etc.).  On
Windows, also O_TEXT and O_BINARY.  The 'error' variable (the
exception is raises) is renamed -- its string value is now "os.error",
so newbies don't believe they have to import posix (or nt) to catch
it when they see os.error reported as posix.error.

- A new version of the al (audio library) module for SGI was
contributed by Sjoerd Mullender.

- The regex module has a new function get_syntax() which retrieves the
syntax setting set by set_syntax().  The code was also sanitized,
removing worries about unclean error handling.  See also below for its
successor, re.py.

- The "new" module (which creates new objects of various types) once
again has a fully functioning new.function() method.  Dangerous as
ever!


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
syntax; the new interface avoids the thread-unsafety of the regex
interface.  This comes with a helper extension reopmodule.c and vastly
rewritten regexpr.c.  Most work on this was done by Jeffrey Ollie, Tim
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 module gzip.py; see zlib above.

- New module keyword.py exports knowledge about Python's built-in
keywords.  (New version by Ka-Ping Yee.)

- 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.

- There is now a library module xdrlib.py which can read and write the
XDR data format as used by Sun RPC, for example.  It uses the struct
module.


Changes in library modules
--------------------------

- Module codehack.py is now completely obsolete.

- 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.

- 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).  The FieldStorage class now
has a __len__() method.

- 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, in the form of a
getdate_tz() method and a parsedate_tz() function.  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.

- The StringIO.StringIO class now supports readline(nbytes).  (Lars 
Wirzenius.)  (Of course, you should be using cStringIO for performance.)

- UserDict.py supports the new dictionary methods as well.

- 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.

- Module ftplib.py: added support for parsing a .netrc file (Fred
Drake).  Also added an ntransfercmd() method to the FTP class, which
allows access to the expected size of a transfer when available, and a
parse150() function to the module which parses the corresponding 150
response.

- 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.  The
spliturl() function no longer erroneously throws away all data past
the first newline.  The basejoin() function now intereprets "../"
correctly.

- shelve.py: use cPickle and cStringIO when available.  Also added
a sync() method, which calls the database's sync() method if there is
one.

- 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.

- mailbox.py: Added BabylMailbox.  Improved the way the mailbox is
gotten from the environment.

- Many more modules now correctly open files in binary mode when this
is necessary on non-Unix platforms.

- The copying functions in the undocumented module shutil.py are
smarter.

- The Writer classes in the formatter.py module now have a flush()
method.

- The Python bytecode disassembler module, dis.py, has been enhanced
quite a bit.  There's now one main function, dis.dis(), which takes
almost any kind of object (function, module, class, instance, method,
code object) and disassembles it; without arguments it disassembles
the last frame of the last traceback.  The other functions have
changed slightly, too.

- The imghdr.py module recognizes new image types: BMP, PNG.

- The string module has a new function replace(str, old, new,
[maxsplit]) which does substring replacements.  It is actually
implemented in C in the strop module.  The functions [r]find() an
[r]index() have an optional 4th argument indicating the end of the
substring to search, alsoo implemented by their strop counterparts.
(Remember, never import strop -- import string uses strop when
available with zero overhead.)


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
module, which may be loaded dynamically.  You must enable it (and
specify the correct linraries to link with) in the Modules/Setup file.
Importing the module installs some hooks which enable command line
editing.  When the interpreter shell is invoked interactively, it
attempts to import the readline module; when this fails, the default
input mechanism is used.  The hook variables are PyOS_InputHook and
PyOS_ReadlineFunctionPointer.  (Code contributed by Lee Busby, with
ideas from William Magro.)

- 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.
The allobjects.h header file is gone; instead, you would have to
include Python.h followed by rename2.h.  But you're better off running
Tools/scripts/fixcid.py -s Misc/RENAME on your source, so you can omit
the rename2.h; it will disappear in the next release.

- The API functions in the file cgensupport.c are no longer
supported.  This file has been moved to Modules and is only ever
compiled when the SGI specific 'gl' module is built.

- 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
documentation is incomplete, also see the new Demo/pysvr example
(which shows how to use these in a threaded application) and the
source code.

- There is now a Py_Finalize() function which "de-initializes"
Python.  It is possible to completely restart the interpreter
repeatedly by calling Py_Finalize() followed by Py_Initialize().  A
change of functionality in Py_Initialize() means that it is now a
fatal error to call it while the interpreter is already initialized.
The old, half-hearted Py_Cleanup() routine is gone.  Use of Py_Exit()
is deprecated (it is nothing more than Py_Finalize() followed by
exit()).

- There are no known memory leaks left.  While Py_Finalize() doesn't
free *all* allocated memory (some of it is hard to track down),
repeated calls to Py_Finalize() and Py_Initialize() do not create
unaccessible heap blocks.

- There is now explicit per-thread state.  (Inspired by, but not the
same as, Greg Stein's free threading patches.)

- There is now better support for threading C applications.  There are
now explicit APIs to manipulate the interpreter lock.  Read the source
or the Demo/pysvr example; the new functions are
PyEval_{Acquire,Release}{Lock,Thread}().

- New wrappers around malloc() and friends: Py_Malloc() etc. call
malloc() and call PyErr_NoMemory() when it fails; PyMem_Malloc() call
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.)

- New C API PyImport_Import() which uses whatever __import__() hook
that is installed for the current execution environment.  By Jim
Fulton.

- It is now possible for an extension module's init function to fail
non-fatally, by calling one of the PyErr_* functions and returning.

- 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.)

- 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.)

- 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).

- 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.

- PyArg_GetInt() is gone.

- It's no longer necessary to include graminit.h when calling one of
the extended parser API functions.  The three public grammar start
symbols are now in Python.h as Py_single_input, Py_file_input, and
Py_eval_input.


Tkinter
-------

- On popular demand, _tkinter once again installs a hook for readline
that processes certain Tk events while waiting for the user to type
(using PyOS_InputHook).

- A patch by Craig McPheeters plugs the most obnoxious memory leaks,
caused by command definitions referencing widget objects beyond their
lifetime.

- New standard dialog modules: tkColorChooser.py, tkCommonDialog.py,
tkMessageBox.py, tkFileDialog.py, tkSimpleDialog.py These interface
with the new Tk dialog scripts.  Contributed by Fredrik Lundh.

- 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
works well under Windows and Mac (with the latest Tk ports to those
platforms).  It also supports threading -- it is safe for one
(Python-created) thread to be blocked in _tkinter.mainloop() while
other threads modify widgets.  (To make the changes visible, those
threads must use update_idletasks()method.)  Unfortunately, on Windows
and Mac, Tk 8.0 no longer supports CreateFileHandler, so
_tkinter.createfilehandler is not available on those platforms.  I
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).


Tools and Demos
---------------

- 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.

- 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 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.

- 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.

- New examples (Demo/extend) that show how to use the generic
extension makefile (Misc/Makefile.pre.in).

- Tools/scripts/h2py.py now supports C++ comments.

- Tools/scripts/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.

- Demo/classes/Rat.py completely rewritten by Sjoerd Mullender.


Windows (NT and 95)
-------------------

- 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).

- See the note on the new module search path in the "Miscellaneous" section 
above.

- Support for Win32s (the 32-bit Windows API under Windows 3.1) is
basically withdrawn.  If it still works for you, you're lucky.

- 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().

- The -u option not only sets the standard I/O streams to unbuffered 
status, but also sets them in binary mode.

- 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 ntpath module (normally used as os.path) supports ~ to $HOME 
expansion in expanduser().

- The freeze tool now works on Windows.

- See also the Tkinter category for a sad note on
_tkinter.createfilehandler().

- The truncate() method for file objects now works on Windows.

- Py_Initialize() is no longer called when the DLL is loaded.  You
must call it yourself.  (And you can't call it twice -- it's a fatal
error to call it when Python is already initialized.)


Mac
---

- As always, the Macintosh port will be done by Jack Jansen.  He will
make a separate announcement for the Mac specific source code and the
binary distribution(s) when these are ready.


Fixed after 1.5a3 was released
------------------------------

The following changes have been made to the source base after the
release of 1.5a3.  These need to be merged into their respective
categories for the next release.

- faqwiz.py: version 0.8; Recognize https:// as URL; <html>...</html>
feature; better install instructions; removed faqmain.py (which was an
older version).

- nntplib.py: Fixed some bugs reported by Lars Wirzenius (to Debian)
about the treatment of lines starting with '.'.  Added a minimal test
function.

- struct module: ignore most whitespace in format strings.

- urllib.py: close the socket and temp file in URLopener.retrieve() so
that multiple retrievals using the same connection work.

- Three new C API functions:

  - int PyErr_GivenExceptionMatches(obj1, obj2)

    Returns 1 if obj1 and obj2 are the same object, or if obj1 is an
    instance of type obj2, or of a class derived from obj2

  - int PyErr_ExceptionMatches(obj)

    Higher level wrapper around PyErr_GivenExceptionMatches() which uses
    PyErr_Occurred() as obj1.  This will be the more commonly called
    function.

  - void PyErr_NormalizeException(typeptr, valptr, tbptr)

    Normalizes exceptions, and places the normalized values in the
    arguments.  If type is not a class, this does nothing.  If type is a
    class, then it makes sure that value is an instance of the class by:

    1. if instance is of the type, or a class derived from type, it does
       nothing.

    2. otherwise it instantiates the class, using the value as an
       argument.  If value is None, it uses an empty arg tuple, and if
       the value is a tuple, it uses just that.

- Demo/metaclasses: new demo subdir explains metaclasses (read
index.html in a browser).

- core interpreter: remove the distinction between tuple and list
unpacking; allow an arbitrary sequence on the right hand side of any
unpack instruction.  (UNPACK_LIST and UNPACK_TUPLE now do the same
thing, which should really be called UNPACK_SEQUENCE.)

- classes: Allow assignments to an instance's __dict__ or __class__,
so you can change ivars (including shared ivars -- shock horror) and
change classes dynamically.  Also make the check on read-only
attributes of classes less draconic -- only the specials names
__dict__, __bases__, __name__ and __{get,set,del}attr__ can't be
assigned.

- Two new built-in functions: issubclass() and isinstance().  Both
take classes as their second arguments.  The former takes a class as
the first argument and returns true iff first is second, or is a
subclass of second.  The latter takes any object as the first argument
and returns true iff first is an instance of the second, or any
subclass of second.

- configure: Added configuration tests for presence of alarm(),
pause(), and getpwent().

- Doc/Makefile: changed latex2html targets.

- classes: Reverse the search order for the Don Beaudry hook so that
the first class with an applicable hook wins.  Makes more sense.

- Changed the checks made in Py_Initialize() and Py_Finalize().  It is
now legal to call these more than once.  The first call to
Py_Initialize() initializes, the first call to Py_Finalize()
finalizes.  There's also a new API, Py_IsInitalized() which checks
whether we are already initialized (in case you want to leave things
as they were).

- Completely disable the declarations for malloc(), realloc() and
free().  Any 90's C compiler has these in header files, and the tests
to decide whether to suppress the declarations kept failing on some
platforms.

- *Before* (instead of after) signalmodule.o is added, remove both
intrcheck.o and sigcheck.o.  This should get rid of warnings in ar or
ld on various systems.

- Added reop to PC/config.c

- configure: Decided to use -Aa -D_HPUX_SOURCE on HP-UX platforms.
Removed outdated HP-UX comments from README.  Added Cray T3E comments.

- Various renames of statically defined functions that had name
conflicts on some systems, e.g. strndup (GNU libc), join (Cray),
roundup (sys/types.h).

- urllib.py: Interpret three slashes in file: URL as local file (for
Netscape on Windows/Mac).

- copy.py: Make sure the objects returned by __getinitargs__() are
kept alive (in the memo) to avoid a certain kind of nasty crash.  (Not
easily reproducable because it requires a later call to
__getinitargs__() to return a tuple that happens to be allocated at
the same address.)

- Added definition of AR to toplevel Makefile.  Renamed @buildno temp
file to buildno1.

- Moved Include/assert.h to Parser/assert.h, which seems to be the
only place where it's needed.

- Alas, the thread support for _tkinter didn't work.  Withdrew it.

- Tweaked the dictionary lookup code again for some more speed
(Vladimir Marangozov).

- NT build: Changed the way python15.lib is included in the other
projects.  Per Mark Hammond's suggestion, add it to the extra libs in
Settings instead of to the project's source files.

- regrtest.py: Change default verbosity so that there are only three
levels left: -q, default and -v.  In default mode, the name of each
test is now printed.  -v is the same as the old -vv.  -q is more quiet
than the old default mode.

- Removed the old FAQ from the distribution.  You now have to get it
from the web!

- Removed the PC/make_nt.in file from the distribution; it is no
longer needed.

- Changed the build sequence so that shared modules are built last.
This fixes things for AIX and doesn't hurt elsewhere.

- Improved test for GNU MP v1 in mpzmodule.c

- fileobject.c: ftell() on Linux discards all buffered data; changed
read() code to use lseek() instead to get the same effect

- configure.in, configure, importdl.c: NeXT sharedlib fixes

- tupleobject.c: PyTuple_SetItem asserts refcnt==1

- resource.c: Different strategy regarding whether to declare
getrusage() and getpagesize() -- #ifdef doesn't work, Linux has
conflicting decls in its headers.  Choice: only declare the return
type, not the argument prototype, and not on Linux.

- importdl.c, configure*: set sharedlib extensions properly for NeXT

- configure*, Makefile.in, Modules/Makefile.pre.in: AIX shared libraries
fixed; moved addition of PURIFY to LINKCC to configure

- reopmodule.c, regexmodule.c, regexpr.c, zlibmodule.c: needed casts
added to shup up various compilers.

- _tkinter.c: removed buggy mac #ifndef

- Doc: various Mac documentation changes, added docs for 'ic' module

- PC/make_nt.in: deleted

- test_time.py, test_strftime.py: tweaks to catch %Z (which may return
"")

- test_rotor.py: print b -> print `b`

- Tkinter.py: (tagOrId) -> (tagOrId,)