5 \title{What's New in Python
2.2}
8 \authoraddress{\email{akuchlin@mems-exchange.org
}}
10 \maketitle\tableofcontents
12 \section{Introduction
}
14 {\large This
document is a draft, and is subject to change until the
15 final version of Python
2.2 is released. Currently it's not up to
16 date at all. Please send any comments, bug reports, or questions, no
17 matter how minor, to
\email{akuchlin@mems-exchange.org
}.
}
19 This article explains the new features in Python
2.2. Python
2.2
20 includes some significant changes that go far toward cleaning up the
21 language's darkest corners, and some exciting new features.
23 This article doesn't attempt to provide a complete specification for
24 the new features, but instead provides a convenient overview of the
25 new features. For full details, you should refer to
2.2 documentation
27 \citetitle[http://python.sourceforge.net/devel-docs/lib/lib.html
]{Python
28 Library Reference
} and the
29 \citetitle[http://python.sourceforge.net/devel-docs/ref/ref.html
]{Python
30 Reference Manual
}, or to the PEP for a particular new feature.
31 % These \citetitle marks should get the python.org URLs for the final
32 % release, just as soon as the docs are published there.
34 The final release of Python
2.2 is planned for October
2001.
37 %======================================================================
38 % It looks like this set of changes will likely get into 2.2,
39 % so I need to read and digest the relevant PEPs.
40 %\section{PEP 252: Type and Class Changes}
44 % GvR's description at http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
48 %\seepep{252}{Making Types Look More Like Classes}{Written and implemented
54 %======================================================================
55 \section{PEP
234: Iterators
}
57 A significant addition to
2.2 is an iteration interface at both the C
58 and Python levels. Objects can define how they can be looped over by
61 In Python versions up to
2.1, the usual way to make
\code{for item in
62 obj
} work is to define a
\method{__getitem__()
} method that looks
66 def __getitem__(self, index):
70 \method{__getitem__()
} is more properly used to define an indexing
71 operation on an object so that you can write
\code{obj
[5]} to retrieve
72 the fifth element. It's a bit misleading when you're using this only
73 to support
\keyword{for
} loops. Consider some file-like object that
74 wants to be looped over; the
\var{index
} parameter is essentially
75 meaningless, as the class probably assumes that a series of
76 \method{__getitem__()
} calls will be made, with
\var{index
}
77 incrementing by one each time. In other words, the presence of the
78 \method{__getitem__()
} method doesn't mean that
\code{file
[5]} will
79 work, though it really should.
81 In Python
2.2, iteration can be implemented separately, and
82 \method{__getitem__()
} methods can be limited to classes that really
83 do support random access. The basic idea of iterators is quite
84 simple. A new built-in function,
\function{iter(obj)
}, returns an
85 iterator for the object
\var{obj
}. (It can also take two arguments:
86 \code{iter(
\var{C
},
\var{sentinel
})
} will call the callable
\var{C
},
87 until it returns
\var{sentinel
}, which will signal that the iterator
88 is done. This form probably won't be used very often.)
90 Python classes can define an
\method{__iter__()
} method, which should
91 create and return a new iterator for the object; if the object is its
92 own iterator, this method can just return
\code{self
}. In particular,
93 iterators will usually be their own iterators. Extension types
94 implemented in C can implement a
\code{tp_iter
} function in order to
95 return an iterator, and extension types that want to behave as
96 iterators can define a
\code{tp_iternext
} function.
98 So what do iterators do? They have one required method,
99 \method{next()
}, which takes no arguments and returns the next value.
100 When there are no more values to be returned, calling
\method{next()
}
101 should raise the
\exception{StopIteration
} exception.
107 <iterator object at
0x8116870>
115 Traceback (most recent call last):
116 File "<stdin>", line
1, in ?
121 In
2.2, Python's
\keyword{for
} statement no longer expects a sequence;
122 it expects something for which
\function{iter()
} will return something.
123 For backward compatibility, and convenience, an iterator is
124 automatically constructed for sequences that don't implement
125 \method{__iter__()
} or a
\code{tp_iter
} slot, so
\code{for i in
126 [1,
2,
3]} will still work. Wherever the Python interpreter loops over
127 a sequence, it's been changed to use the iterator protocol. This
128 means you can do things like this:
138 Iterator support has been added to some of Python's basic types. The
139 \keyword{in
} operator now works on dictionaries, so
\code{\var{key
} in
140 dict
} is now equivalent to
\code{dict.has_key(
\var{key
})
}.
141 Calling
\function{iter()
} on a dictionary will return an iterator
142 which loops over its keys:
145 >>> m =
{'Jan':
1, 'Feb':
2, 'Mar':
3, 'Apr':
4, 'May':
5, 'Jun':
6,
146 ... 'Jul':
7, 'Aug':
8, 'Sep':
9, 'Oct':
10, 'Nov':
11, 'Dec':
12}
147 >>> for key in m: print key, m
[key
]
164 That's just the default behaviour. If you want to iterate over keys,
165 values, or key/value pairs, you can explicitly call the
166 \method{iterkeys()
},
\method{itervalues()
}, or
\method{iteritems()
}
167 methods to get an appropriate iterator.
169 Files also provide an iterator, which calls its
\method{readline()
}
170 method until there are no more lines in the file. This means you can
171 now read each line of a file using code like this:
175 # do something for each line
178 Note that you can only go forward in an iterator; there's no way to
179 get the previous element, reset the iterator, or make a copy of it.
180 An iterator object could provide such additional capabilities, but the
181 iterator protocol only requires a
\method{next()
} method.
185 \seepep{234}{Iterators
}{Written by Ka-Ping Yee and GvR; implemented
186 by the Python Labs crew, mostly by GvR and Tim Peters.
}
191 %======================================================================
192 \section{PEP
255: Simple Generators
}
194 Generators are another new feature, one that interacts with the
195 introduction of iterators.
197 You're doubtless familiar with how function calls work in Python or
198 C. When you call a function, it gets a private area where its local
199 variables are created. When the function reaches a
\keyword{return
}
200 statement, the local variables are destroyed and the resulting value
201 is returned to the caller. A later call to the same function will get
202 a fresh new set of local variables. But, what if the local variables
203 weren't destroyed on exiting a function? What if you could later
204 resume the function where it left off? This is what generators
205 provide; they can be thought of as resumable functions.
207 Here's the simplest example of a generator function:
210 def generate_ints(N):
215 A new keyword,
\keyword{yield
}, was introduced for generators. Any
216 function containing a
\keyword{yield
} statement is a generator
217 function; this is detected by Python's bytecode compiler which
218 compiles the function specially. Because a new keyword was
219 introduced, generators must be explicitly enabled in a module by
220 including a
\code{from __future__ import generators
} statement near
221 the top of the module's source code. In Python
2.3 this statement
222 will become unnecessary.
224 When you call a generator function, it doesn't return a single value;
225 instead it returns a generator object that supports the iterator
226 interface. On executing the
\keyword{yield
} statement, the generator
227 outputs the value of
\code{i
}, similar to a
\keyword{return
}
228 statement. The big difference between
\keyword{yield
} and a
229 \keyword{return
} statement is that, on reaching a
\keyword{yield
} the
230 generator's state of execution is suspended and local variables are
231 preserved. On the next call to the generator's
\code{.next()
} method,
232 the function will resume executing immediately after the
233 \keyword{yield
} statement. (For complicated reasons, the
234 \keyword{yield
} statement isn't allowed inside the
\keyword{try
} block
235 of a
\code{try...finally
} statement; read PEP
255 for a full
236 explanation of the interaction between
\keyword{yield
} and
239 Here's a sample usage of the
\function{generate_ints
} generator:
242 >>> gen = generate_ints(
3)
244 <generator object at
0x8117f90>
252 Traceback (most recent call last):
253 File "<stdin>", line
1, in ?
254 File "<stdin>", line
2, in generate_ints
259 You could equally write
\code{for i in generate_ints(
5)
}, or
260 \code{a,b,c = generate_ints(
3)
}.
262 Inside a generator function, the
\keyword{return
} statement can only
263 be used without a value, and signals the end of the procession of
264 values; afterwards the generator cannot return any further values.
265 \keyword{return
} with a value, such as
\code{return
5}, is a syntax
266 error inside a generator function. The end of the generator's results
267 can also be indicated by raising
\exception{StopIteration
} manually,
268 or by just letting the flow of execution fall off the bottom of the
271 You could achieve the effect of generators manually by writing your
272 own class and storing all the local variables of the generator as
273 instance variables. For example, returning a list of integers could
274 be done by setting
\code{self.count
} to
0, and having the
275 \method{next()
} method increment
\code{self.count
} and return it.
276 However, for a moderately complicated generator, writing a
277 corresponding class would be much messier.
278 \file{Lib/test/test_generators.py
} contains a number of more
279 interesting examples. The simplest one implements an in-order
280 traversal of a tree using generators recursively.
283 # A recursive generator that generates Tree leaves in in-order.
286 for x in inorder(t.left):
289 for x in inorder(t.right):
293 Two other examples in
\file{Lib/test/test_generators.py
} produce
294 solutions for the N-Queens problem (placing $N$ queens on an $NxN$
295 chess board so that no queen threatens another) and the Knight's Tour
296 (a route that takes a knight to every square of an $NxN$ chessboard
297 without visiting any square twice).
299 The idea of generators comes from other programming languages,
300 especially Icon (
\url{http://www.cs.arizona.edu/icon/
}), where the
301 idea of generators is central to the language. In Icon, every
302 expression and function call behaves like a generator. One example
303 from ``An Overview of the Icon Programming Language'' at
304 \url{http://www.cs.arizona.edu/icon/docs/ipd266.htm
} gives an idea of
305 what this looks like:
308 sentence := "Store it in the neighboring harbor"
309 if (i := find("or", sentence)) >
5 then write(i)
312 The
\function{find()
} function returns the indexes at which the
313 substring ``or'' is found:
3,
23,
33. In the
\keyword{if
} statement,
314 \code{i
} is first assigned a value of
3, but
3 is less than
5, so the
315 comparison fails, and Icon retries it with the second value of
23.
23
316 is greater than
5, so the comparison now succeeds, and the code prints
317 the value
23 to the screen.
319 Python doesn't go nearly as far as Icon in adopting generators as a
320 central concept. Generators are considered a new part of the core
321 Python language, but learning or using them isn't compulsory; if they
322 don't solve any problems that you have, feel free to ignore them.
323 This is different from Icon where the idea of generators is a basic
324 concept. One novel feature of Python's interface as compared to
325 Icon's is that a generator's state is represented as a concrete object
326 that can be passed around to other functions or stored in a data
331 \seepep{255}{Simple Generators
}{Written by Neil Schemenauer, Tim
332 Peters, Magnus Lie Hetland. Implemented mostly by Neil Schemenauer
333 and Tim Peters, with other fixes from the Python Labs crew.
}
338 %======================================================================
339 \section{Unicode Changes
}
341 Python's Unicode support has been enhanced a bit in
2.2. Unicode
342 strings are usually stored as UCS-
2, as
16-bit unsigned integers.
343 Python
2.2 can also be compiled to use UCS-
4,
32-bit unsigned
344 integers, as its internal encoding by supplying
345 \longprogramopt{enable-unicode=ucs4
} to the configure script. When
346 built to use UCS-
4 (a ``wide Python''), the interpreter can natively
347 handle Unicode characters from U+
000000 to U+
110000, so the range of
348 legal values for the
\function{unichr()
} function is expanded
349 accordingly. Using an interpreter compiled to use UCS-
2 (a ``narrow
350 Python''), values greater than
65535 will still cause
351 \function{unichr()
} to raise a
\exception{ValueError
} exception.
353 All this is the province of the still-unimplemented PEP
261, ``Support
354 for `wide' Unicode characters''; consult it for further details, and
355 please offer comments on the PEP and on your experiences with the
357 % XXX update previous line once 2.2 reaches beta.
359 Another change is much simpler to explain. Since their introduction,
360 Unicode strings have supported an
\method{encode()
} method to convert
361 the string to a selected encoding such as UTF-
8 or Latin-
1. A
362 symmetric
\method{decode(
\optional{\var{encoding
}})
} method has been
363 added to
8-bit strings (though not to Unicode strings) in
2.2.
364 \method{decode()
} assumes that the string is in the specified encoding
365 and decodes it, returning whatever is returned by the codec.
367 Using this new feature, codecs have been added for tasks not directly
368 related to Unicode. For example, codecs have been added for
369 uu-encoding, MIME's base64 encoding, and compression with the
370 \module{zlib
} module:
373 >>> s = """Here is a lengthy piece of redundant, overly verbose,
374 ... and repetitive text.
376 >>> data = s.encode('zlib')
378 'x
\x9c\r\xc9\xc1\r\x80 \x10\x04\xc0?Ul...'
379 >>> data.decode('zlib')
380 'Here is a lengthy piece of redundant, overly verbose,
\nand repetitive text.
\n'
381 >>> print s.encode('uu')
383 M2&
5R92!I<R!A(&QE;F=T:'D@<&EE8V4@;V8@<F5D=
6YD86YT+"!O=F5R;'D@
384 >=F5R8F
]S92P*
86YD(')E<&
5T:
71I=F4@=&
5X="X*
387 >>> "sheesh".encode('rot-
13')
391 \method{encode()
} and
\method{decode()
} were implemented by
392 Marc-Andr\'e Lemburg. The changes to support using UCS-
4 internally
393 were implemented by Fredrik Lundh and Martin von L\"owis.
397 \seepep{261}{Support for `wide' Unicode characters
}{PEP written by
398 Paul Prescod. Not yet accepted or fully implemented.
}
402 %======================================================================
403 \section{PEP
227: Nested Scopes
}
405 In Python
2.1, statically nested scopes were added as an optional
406 feature, to be enabled by a
\code{from __future__ import
407 nested_scopes
} directive. In
2.2 nested scopes no longer need to be
408 specially enabled, but are always enabled. The rest of this section
409 is a copy of the description of nested scopes from my ``What's New in
410 Python
2.1''
document; if you read it when
2.1 came out, you can skip
411 the rest of this section.
413 The largest change introduced in Python
2.1, and made complete in
2.2,
414 is to Python's scoping rules. In Python
2.0, at any given time there
415 are at most three namespaces used to look up variable names: local,
416 module-level, and the built-in namespace. This often surprised people
417 because it didn't match their intuitive expectations. For example, a
418 nested recursive function definition doesn't work:
425 return g(value-
1) +
1
429 The function
\function{g()
} will always raise a
\exception{NameError
}
430 exception, because the binding of the name
\samp{g
} isn't in either
431 its local namespace or in the module-level namespace. This isn't much
432 of a problem in practice (how often do you recursively define interior
433 functions like this?), but this also made using the
\keyword{lambda
}
434 statement clumsier, and this was a problem in practice. In code which
435 uses
\keyword{lambda
} you can often find local variables being copied
436 by passing them as the default values of arguments.
439 def find(self, name):
440 "Return list of any entries equal to 'name'"
441 L = filter(lambda x, name=name: x == name,
446 The readability of Python code written in a strongly functional style
447 suffers greatly as a result.
449 The most significant change to Python
2.2 is that static scoping has
450 been added to the language to fix this problem. As a first effect,
451 the
\code{name=name
} default argument is now unnecessary in the above
452 example. Put simply, when a given variable name is not assigned a
453 value within a function (by an assignment, or the
\keyword{def
},
454 \keyword{class
}, or
\keyword{import
} statements), references to the
455 variable will be looked up in the local namespace of the enclosing
456 scope. A more detailed explanation of the rules, and a dissection of
457 the implementation, can be found in the PEP.
459 This change may cause some compatibility problems for code where the
460 same variable name is used both at the module level and as a local
461 variable within a function that contains further function definitions.
462 This seems rather unlikely though, since such code would have been
463 pretty confusing to read in the first place.
465 One side effect of the change is that the
\code{from
\var{module
}
466 import *
} and
\keyword{exec
} statements have been made illegal inside
467 a function scope under certain conditions. The Python reference
468 manual has said all along that
\code{from
\var{module
} import *
} is
469 only legal at the top level of a module, but the CPython interpreter
470 has never enforced this before. As part of the implementation of
471 nested scopes, the compiler which turns Python source into bytecodes
472 has to generate different code to access variables in a containing
473 scope.
\code{from
\var{module
} import *
} and
\keyword{exec
} make it
474 impossible for the compiler to figure this out, because they add names
475 to the local namespace that are unknowable at compile time.
476 Therefore, if a function contains function definitions or
477 \keyword{lambda
} expressions with free variables, the compiler will
478 flag this by raising a
\exception{SyntaxError
} exception.
480 To make the preceding explanation a bit clearer, here's an example:
485 # The next line is a syntax error
491 Line
4 containing the
\keyword{exec
} statement is a syntax error,
492 since
\keyword{exec
} would define a new local variable named
\samp{x
}
493 whose value should be accessed by
\function{g()
}.
495 This shouldn't be much of a limitation, since
\keyword{exec
} is rarely
496 used in most Python code (and when it is used, it's often a sign of a
501 \seepep{227}{Statically Nested Scopes
}{Written and implemented by
507 %======================================================================
508 \section{New and Improved Modules
}
512 \item The
\module{xmlrpclib
} module was contributed to the standard
513 library by Fredrik Lundh. It provides support for writing XML-RPC
514 clients; XML-RPC is a simple remote procedure call protocol built on
515 top of HTTP and XML. For example, the following snippet retrieves a
516 list of RSS channels from the O'Reilly Network, and then retrieves a
517 list of the recent headlines for one channel:
521 s = xmlrpclib.Server(
522 'http://www.oreillynet.com/meerkat/xml-rpc/server.php')
523 channels = s.meerkat.getChannels()
524 # channels is a list of dictionaries, like this:
525 #
[{'id':
4, 'title': 'Freshmeat Daily News'
}
526 #
{'id':
190, 'title': '
32Bits Online'
},
527 #
{'id':
4549, 'title': '
3DGamers'
}, ...
]
529 # Get the items for one channel
530 items = s.meerkat.getItems(
{'channel':
4} )
532 # 'items' is another list of dictionaries, like this:
533 #
[{'link': 'http://freshmeat.net/releases/
52719/',
534 # 'description': 'A utility which converts HTML to XSL FO.',
535 # 'title': 'html2fo
0.3 (Default)'
}, ...
]
538 See
\url{http://www.xmlrpc.com/
} for more information about XML-RPC.
540 \item The
\module{socket
} module can be compiled to support IPv6;
541 specify the
\longprogramopt{enable-ipv6
} option to Python's configure
542 script. (Contributed by Jun-ichiro ``itojun'' Hagino.)
544 \item Two new format characters were added to the
\module{struct
}
545 module for
64-bit integers on platforms that support the C
546 \ctype{long long
} type.
\samp{q
} is for a signed
64-bit integer,
547 and
\samp{Q
} is for an unsigned one. The value is returned in
548 Python's long integer type. (Contributed by Tim Peters.)
550 \item In the interpreter's interactive mode, there's a new built-in
551 function
\function{help()
}, that uses the
\module{pydoc
} module
552 introduced in Python
2.1 to provide interactive.
553 \code{help(
\var{object
})
} displays any available help text about
554 \var{object
}.
\code{help()
} with no argument puts you in an online
555 help utility, where you can enter the names of functions, classes,
556 or modules to read their help text.
557 (Contributed by Guido van Rossum, using Ka-Ping Yee's
\module{pydoc
} module.)
559 \item Various bugfixes and performance improvements have been made
560 to the SRE engine underlying the
\module{re
} module. For example,
561 \function{re.sub()
} will now use
\function{string.replace()
}
562 automatically when the pattern and its replacement are both just
563 literal strings without regex metacharacters. Another contributed
564 patch speeds up certain Unicode character ranges by a factor of
565 two. (SRE is maintained by Fredrik Lundh. The BIGCHARSET patch was
566 contributed by Martin von L\"owis.)
568 \item The
\module{imaplib
} module, maintained by Piers Lauder, has
569 support for several new extensions: the NAMESPACE extension defined
570 in
\rfc{2342}, SORT, GETACL and SETACL. (Contributed by Anthony
571 Baxter and Michel Pelletier.)
573 \item The
\module{rfc822
} module's parsing of email addresses is
574 now compliant with
\rfc{2822}, an update to
\rfc{822}. The module's
575 name is
\emph{not
} going to be changed to
\samp{rfc2822
}.
576 (Contributed by Barry Warsaw.)
581 %======================================================================
582 \section{Other Changes and Fixes
}
584 % XXX update the patch and bug figures as we go
585 As usual there were a bunch of other improvements and bugfixes
586 scattered throughout the source tree. A search through the CVS change
587 logs finds there were
43 patches applied, and
77 bugs fixed; both
588 figures are likely to be underestimates. Some of the more notable
593 \item Keyword arguments passed to builtin functions that don't take them
594 now cause a
\exception{TypeError
} exception to be raised, with the
595 message "
\var{function
} takes no keyword arguments".
597 \item The code for the Mac OS port for Python, maintained by Jack
598 Jansen, is now kept in the main Python CVS tree.
600 \item The new license introduced with Python
1.6 wasn't
601 GPL-compatible. This is fixed by some minor textual changes to the
602 2.2 license, so Python can now be embedded inside a GPLed program
603 again. The license changes were also applied to the Python
2.0.1
606 \item Profiling and tracing functions can now be implemented in C,
607 which can operate at much higher speeds than Python-based functions
608 and should reduce the overhead of enabling profiling and tracing, so
609 it will be of interest to authors of development environments for
610 Python. Two new C functions were added to Python's API,
611 \cfunction{PyEval_SetProfile()
} and
\cfunction{PyEval_SetTrace()
}.
612 The existing
\function{sys.setprofile()
} and
613 \function{sys.settrace()
} functions still exist, and have simply
614 been changed to use the new C-level interface. (Contributed by Fred
617 \item Another low-level API, primarily of interest to implementors
618 of Python debuggers and development tools, was added.
619 \cfunction{PyInterpreterState_Head()
} and
620 \cfunction{PyInterpreterState_Next()
} let a caller walk through all
621 the existing interpreter objects;
622 \cfunction{PyInterpreterState_ThreadHead()
} and
623 \cfunction{PyThreadState_Next()
} allow looping over all the thread
624 states for a given interpreter. (Contributed by David Beazley.)
626 % XXX is this explanation correct?
627 \item When presented with a Unicode filename on Windows, Python will
628 now correctly convert it to a string using the MBCS encoding.
629 Filenames on Windows are a case where Python's choice of ASCII as
630 the default encoding turns out to be an annoyance.
632 This patch also adds
\samp{et
} as a format sequence to
633 \cfunction{PyArg_ParseTuple
};
\samp{et
} takes both a parameter and
634 an encoding name, and converts it to the given encoding if the
635 parameter turns out to be a Unicode string, or leaves it alone if
636 it's an
8-bit string, assuming it to already be in the desired
637 encoding. (This differs from the
\samp{es
} format character, which
638 assumes that
8-bit strings are in Python's default ASCII encoding
639 and converts them to the specified new encoding.)
641 (Contributed by Mark Hammond with assistance from Marc-Andr\'e
644 \item The
\file{Tools/scripts/ftpmirror.py
} script
645 now parses a
\file{.netrc
} file, if you have one.
646 (Contributed by Mike Romberg.)
648 \item Some features of the object returned by the
649 \function{xrange()
} function are now deprecated, and trigger
650 warnings when they're accessed; they'll disappear in Python
2.3.
651 \class{xrange
} objects tried to pretend they were full sequence
652 types by supporting slicing, sequence multiplication, and the
653 \keyword{in
} operator, but these features were rarely used and
654 therefore buggy. The
\method{tolist()
} method and the
655 \member{start
},
\member{stop
}, and
\member{step
} attributes are also
656 being deprecated. At the C level, the fourth argument to the
657 \cfunction{PyRange_New()
} function,
\samp{repeat
}, has also been
660 \item There were a bunch of patches to the dictionary
661 implementation, mostly to fix potential core dumps if a dictionary
662 contains objects that sneakily changed their hash value, or mutated
663 the dictionary they were contained in. For a while python-dev fell
664 into a gentle rhythm of Michael Hudson finding a case that dump
665 core, Tim Peters fixing it, Michael finding another case, and round
668 \item On Windows, Python can now be compiled with Borland C thanks
669 to a number of patches contributed by Stephen Hansen.
671 \item On platforms where Python uses the C
\cfunction{dlopen()
} function
672 to load extension modules, it's now possible to set the flags used
673 by
\cfunction{dlopen()
} using the
\function{sys.getdlopenflags()
} and
674 \function{sys.setdlopenflags()
} functions. (Contributed by Bram Stolk.)
679 %======================================================================
680 \section{Acknowledgements
}
682 The author would like to thank the following people for offering
683 suggestions and corrections to various drafts of this article: Fred
684 Bremmer, Fred L. Drake, Jr., Marc-Andr\'e Lemburg,
685 Tim Peters, Neil Schemenauer, Guido van Rossum.