Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2000 20:58:16 -0400
From: A.M. Kuchling amk@mira.erols.com
To: python-announce@python.org
Subject: Python-dev summary: Oct 1-16
Python-dev summary, October 1-16, 2000
(To comment on material in this python-dev summary, you can
simply post to comp.lang.python / python-list@python.org.)
Released at last!
Python 2.0final was released on October 16, doubtless as a late
birthday gift for me:
ftp://ftp.python.org/pub/python/src/python-2.0.tar.gz
Python 2.1
The python-dev traffic in the two weeks leading up to that
announcement continued to be primarily focused on particular small
bugs and how to fix them. Now that 2.0 is out, though, the CVS tree
will be reopened for larger changes:
http://www.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2000-October/016694.html
It’s important to note that this doesn’t mean people can check
in any changes they like. Large changes must still be first written
up as a PEP and get approved by the community. Jeremy Hylton is
responsible for PEP 226, which will track the release schedule for
Python 2.1 Currently the schedule calls for a beta in February 2001
and a final release in March, but this is certain to change.
http://python.sourceforge.net/peps/pep-0226.html
Python and floating point
The largest thread that arose in this time span was about
Python’s support for floating point, and the discussion spread out
across 3 different mailing lists before it was over. It all started
with a seemingly minor bug report, when Huaiyu Zhu pointed out that
math.exp(-746) returns 0.0 in Python 1.5.2, but raises an
OverflowError in 2.0b2:
http://www.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2000-October/120732.html
This is surprising, because e^(-746) would really be an
underflow, not an overflow. The change turned out to be caused by
the Python binary no longer linking with -lieee on Linux, and a
patch was committed before 2.0final to change the behaviour for
this one case, but this is just a small manifestation of a much
wider problem, namely that Python lacks IEEE 754 floating point
semantics. IEEE 754 is a specification that carefully nails down a
set of behaviours for binary floating point operations.
Python lacks IEEE 754 semantics because nothing in the C89 or
POSIX standards provides a portable way to request them. Tim
Peters: “There’s no bug here, in the strong sense that no
documented (or even intended!) behavior has changed. What happened
is that one platform accident got changed to a different platform
accident. You certainly get sympathy for that, but not enough to
buy radical last-minute changes.”
http://www.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2000-October/016566.html
The discussion then continued for a long while, with the bulk of
the argument between Huaiyu and Tim. Huaiyu said that Python 2.0’s
behaviour should be changed in a few ways, and Tim argued that any
fix would merely change the current unpredictable and nonportable
behaviour to some other unpredictable and nonportable behaviour,
and that making changes a few days before the final release of 2.0
was a bad idea in any event. It was pleasing to see that, though
Huaiyu and Tim occasionally got quite short with each other, the
tone remained that of a contentious technical discussion and not a
flamewar.
IEEE 754 lets the programmer specify different modes for
handling errors and for rounding. For example, the programmer can
select whether division by zero triggers a IEEE 754 exception,
returns NaN (Not a Number) or Inf (infinity), or returns some other
arbitrary value (0, pi, 187.42).
Different programs will want different behaviours. For example,
Steven D. Majewski usually wants the calculation to continue
despite an error: “I do a lot of vectorized operations on what are
often independent samples. If some of the numbers overflow or
underflow, that just represents an outlier or bad sample. I don’t
want it to blow off the whole pipeline of operations on the other
data points — they are independent of the bad points.”
http://www.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2000-October/016597.html
On the other hand, Paul Dubois wrote: “Some people use Inf but
most people want the code to STOP so they can find out where the
INFS started. Otherwise, two hours later you have big arrays of
Infs and no idea how it happened. Likewise sqrt(-1.) needs to stop,
not put a zero and keep going.”
http://www.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2000-October/016593.html
Clearly, flexibility on this point is required.
Huaiyu even wrote Prof. William Kahan, the strongest advocate
for IEEE 754 and one of the authors of the standard. Kahan’s
response is packed with information from an expert, and is well
worth reading. “The programmer is the only one competent to decide
which exceptions his program can ignore, which to allow to pass on
to detection later, which to trap if they must. … ‘Interim steps’
have a tendency to become permanent in our industry, where
‘Compatibility’ is the way the sins of the fathers are inflicted
upon the third and fourth generations.”
http://www.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2000-October/143284.html
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/ieee754status/754story.html
http://babbage.cs.qc.edu/courses/cs341/IEEE-754references.html
C89 and POSIX say nothing about IEEE 754. The more recent C99
standard *does* specify ways to set IEEE 754 behaviour, which means
that as gcc+glibc and platform compilers move to support C99,
Python can finally implement it portably. However, C99 is no magic
bullet, and there will still be tricky problems to solve. For
example, how will 754 interact with threads? Can one thread set
Infs as the return value for errors while another thread runs a
trap handler in the event of an error?
So, while the particular error reported was fixed for 2.0, but
the question of IEEE 754 support for Python remains open; it’s not
something you can implement in a week. It seems likely that
someone, perhaps Kevin Jacobs, will write a PEP for 2.1 suggesting
a way to add 754 support:
http://www.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2000-October/143294.html
Buffer objects
Mark Hammond pointed out an apparent oddity in the behaviour of
buffer objects and the + operator: “Adding 2 buffer objects
together yields a string. Fair enough. Adding a buffer and a string
yields a type error! Eeek.”
http://www.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2000-October/016675.html
Greg Stein, who originally suggested and implemented the buffer
object, pointed out that this was unavoidable: “It is caused by the
non-commutative aspect of Python types. You end up with a string,
and that type doesn’t know how to add a buffer to itself.”
http://www.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2000-October/016682.html
Guido expressed his misgivings about the buffer interface: “The
buffer interface is one of the most misunderstood parts of Python.
I believe that if it were PEPped today, it would have a hard time
getting accepted in its current form.”
http://www.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2000-October/016685.html
Greg Stein responded, saying the problems are fixable: “Many of
the issues with the buffer object can be solved with simple
changes.”
http://www.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2000-October/016699.html
Jeff Collins also pointed out that buffer objects are very
useful for conserving memory for the PalmOS port: “Directly
referencing the data of objects like bytecodes and strings would
greatly reduce the dynamic heap (current limit of 256K on PalmOS
3.5 on devices with 4M RAM or greater) requirements.”
http://www.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2000-October/016691.html
Other matters
Greg Ward announced that the Distutils have reached version
1.0:
http://www.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2000-October/016445.html
Jeremy Hylton discovered that one portion of the Distutils, the
actual binary used for generating Windows installers, didn’t have
its source available in the Python CVS tree, only in the Distutils
CVS tree. Thomas Heller explained: “bdist_wininst creates a
self-extracting zipfile from two components: a stub program
(wininst.exe) plus a zip-file containing the code to be
distributed. Because I did not liked wininst.exe as binary file
checked into CVS, the actual bytes of this exe are included
base64-encoded in the bdist_wininst.py module as string. I’m not
sure whether this is a wise design or not, but that is a different
topic.”
http://www.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2000-October/016540.html
Related Links
Python-dev archives:
http://www.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/
Python project page on SourceForge:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/python
Python Enhancement Proposals (PEPs):
http://python.sourceforge.net/peps/
What’s New in Python 2.0:
http://starship.python.net/crew/amk/python/writing/new-python/