Keywords: whatsnew22

# 10 Interpreter Changes and Fixes

Some of the changes only affect people who deal with the Python interpreter at the C level because they're writing Python extension modules, embedding the interpreter, or just hacking on the interpreter itself. If you only write Python code, none of the changes described here will affect you very much.

- Profiling and tracing functions can now be implemented in C, which can operate at much higher speeds than Python-based functions and should reduce the overhead of profiling and tracing. This will be of interest to authors of development environments for Python. Two new C functions were added to Python's API, `PyEval_SetProfile()` and `PyEval_SetTrace()`. The existing `sys.setprofile()` and `sys.settrace()` functions still exist, and have simply been changed to use the new C-level interface. (Contributed by Fred L. Drake, Jr.)

- Another low-level API, primarily of interest to implementors of Python debuggers and development tools, was added. `PyInterpreterState_Head()` and `PyInterpreterState_Next()` let a caller walk through all the existing interpreter objects; `PyInterpreterState_ThreadHead()` and `PyThreadState_Next()` allow looping over all the thread states for a given interpreter. (Contributed by David Beazley.)

- A new "`et`" format sequence was added to `PyArg_ParseTuple`; "`et`" takes both a parameter and an encoding name, and converts the parameter to the given encoding if the parameter turns out to be a Unicode string, or leaves it alone if it's an 8-bit string, assuming it to already be in the desired encoding. This differs from the "`es`" format character, which assumes that 8-bit strings are in Python's default ASCII encoding and converts them to the specified new encoding. (Contributed by M.-A. Lemburg, and used for the MBCS support on Windows described in the following section.)

- A different argument parsing function, `PyArg_UnpackTuple()`, has been added that's simpler and presumably faster. Instead of specifying a format string, the caller simply gives the minimum and maximum number of arguments expected, and a set of pointers to `PyObject*` variables that will be filled in with argument values.

- Two new flags `METH_NOARGS` and `METH_O` are available in method definition tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments or a single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than calling a corresponding method that uses `METH_VARARGS`. Also, the old `METH_OLDARGS` style of writing C methods is now officially deprecated.

- Two new wrapper functions, `PyOS_snprintf()` and `PyOS_vsnprintf()` were added to provide cross-platform implementations for the relatively new `snprintf()` and `vsnprintf()` C lib APIs. In contrast to the standard `sprintf()` and `vsprintf()` functions, the Python versions check the bounds of the buffer used to protect against buffer overruns. (Contributed by M.-A. Lemburg.)

- The `_PyTuple_Resize()` function has lost an unused parameter, so now it takes 2 parameters instead of 3. The third argument was never used, and can simply be discarded when porting code from earlier versions to Python 2.2.