| +++++++++++ |
| Python News |
| +++++++++++ |
| |
| (editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.) |
| |
| What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1? |
| ================================= |
| |
| *Release date: XX-XXX-2006* |
| |
| Core and builtins |
| ----------------- |
| |
| - Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be |
| built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set. |
| |
| - Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed. |
| |
| - Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations. |
| |
| - Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter. |
| |
| - Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works. |
| This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError. |
| |
| - Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API |
| function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.build_number. Build number |
| is now displayed in interactive prompt banner. |
| |
| - Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally. |
| "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in |
| one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913. |
| |
| - Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec |
| now encodes backslash correctly. |
| |
| - Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005. |
| |
| - Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs |
| and long longs. |
| |
| - SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import" |
| It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error |
| message in this case. |
| |
| - Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the |
| new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap |
| codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available |
| at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS |
| encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo) |
| |
| - Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings |
| |
| - Speed up some Unicode operations. |
| |
| - A new AST parser implementation was completed. |
| |
| - SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions. |
| The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10)) |
| |
| - SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1. |
| |
| - SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory. |
| Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line. |
| |
| - Fix segfault with invalid coding. |
| |
| - SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError. |
| |
| - All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators |
| supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator |
| was empty. |
| |
| - On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be |
| represented as a C int, raise OverflowError. |
| |
| - test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is |
| present). |
| |
| - SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format |
| codes. |
| |
| - Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3 |
| with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF |
| bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron). |
| |
| - Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on |
| Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212). |
| |
| - Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them |
| (fixes bug #1119418). |
| |
| - Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors. |
| |
| - SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for |
| exceptions that cause a function to exit. |
| |
| - The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its |
| own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3 |
| and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged. |
| |
| - SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow(). |
| |
| - SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some |
| reference counts in some error exit cases. |
| |
| - SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over |
| a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified |
| a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how |
| much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no |
| portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's |
| small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object |
| realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C |
| realloc. |
| |
| - SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when |
| attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime(). |
| |
| - SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just |
| like their int counterparts. |
| |
| - SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module |
| Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple |
| interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see |
| http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html |
| for a longer write-up of the problem). |
| |
| - SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when |
| serializing floats. |
| |
| - SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats, |
| the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations |
| of floats now simply copy bytes around. |
| |
| - bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP |
| 278. |
| |
| - patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the |
| proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the |
| magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way |
| subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance |
| to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of |
| PyNumber_*(). |
| Thanks Walter Dörwald. |
| |
| - Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is |
| NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the |
| attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent |
| with the equivalent pure-Python implementation. |
| |
| - It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before |
| PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there |
| are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads() |
| before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that |
| have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet). |
| |
| - Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads |
| disabled caused a crash. |
| |
| - Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method |
| with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called. |
| |
| - Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this |
| fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761 |
| |
| - Added two new builtins, any() and all(). |
| |
| - Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed |
| (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error). |
| Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package |
| (thanks to logistix for that added support). |
| |
| - Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember. |
| |
| - Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was |
| returning None. |
| |
| - Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character |
| ('\') with a specific error message. |
| |
| - Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format. |
| |
| - Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was |
| inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode. |
| |
| - Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and |
| an ferror() call. |
| |
| - min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in |
| list.sort(). |
| |
| - The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions: |
| (2+3) --> (5). |
| |
| - set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985. |
| |
| - Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption |
| in calls to os.read(). |
| |
| - The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal |
| positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future |
| statement occurs after anything other than a doc string. |
| |
| - Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a |
| unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and |
| calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance. |
| |
| Extension Modules |
| ----------------- |
| |
| - Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods. |
| |
| - Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build |
| problem on AIX. |
| |
| - Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments |
| |
| - Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint |
| |
| - Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors |
| |
| - Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract |
| REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs. |
| |
| - Get bsddb module to build with BSD DB version 3.2 |
| |
| - Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1, |
| but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format |
| |
| - Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads. |
| |
| - Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on |
| FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3). |
| |
| - Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error |
| returns in cStringIO.c. |
| |
| - Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec, |
| MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter |
| |
| - Fix memory leak in posix.access(). |
| |
| - Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode. |
| |
| - Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in |
| the file system encoding. |
| |
| - Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for |
| platforms that don't have inet_aton(). |
| |
| - Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets. |
| |
| - Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one |
| line without newlines. |
| |
| - Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did |
| on Windows. |
| |
| - Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen, |
| st_birthtime for FreeBSD. |
| |
| - Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for |
| the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour |
| for large or negative values. |
| |
| - Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows |
| implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false. |
| |
| - Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly. |
| |
| - Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute |
| if available on the platform. |
| |
| - Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if |
| available on the platform. |
| |
| - Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions |
| were set in a different thread than that which called readline. |
| |
| - collections.deque objects now support a remove() method. |
| |
| - operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving |
| multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple |
| keys (primary, secondary, etc). |
| |
| - os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems. |
| |
| - Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer |
| in pyexpat.GetInputContext. |
| |
| - Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current |
| file size. |
| |
| - Added functional.partial(). See PEP309. |
| |
| - Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline. |
| {remove_history,replace_history} |
| |
| - The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password |
| database. |
| |
| - stat_float_times is now True. |
| |
| - array.array objects are now picklable. |
| |
| - the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the |
| args tuple returned by __reduce__(). |
| |
| - itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments. |
| This allows islice() to work more readily with slices: |
| islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step) |
| |
| - datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to |
| create datetime object using a string and format. |
| |
| Library |
| ------- |
| |
| - Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode |
| |
| - Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise |
| LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility, |
| LoadError subclasses IOError. |
| |
| - Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and |
| SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the |
| historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications. |
| In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html> |
| Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python: |
| |
| "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as |
| expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05), |
| is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but |
| that research should continue, and other alternatives may |
| arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK." |
| |
| - Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available |
| modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and |
| xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6. |
| |
| - Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles. |
| |
| - Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again. |
| |
| - Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception |
| is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an |
| illegal argument) |
| |
| - Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there |
| is an error in the format string. |
| |
| - Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann). |
| |
| - Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional |
| "parent" argument. |
| |
| - Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes |
| for padding. |
| |
| - Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the |
| socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows. |
| |
| - Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE |
| to get the correct encoding. |
| |
| - Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of |
| languages. |
| |
| - Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance. |
| |
| - Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime(). |
| |
| - Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0. |
| |
| - Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook |
| functionality. |
| |
| - Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty. |
| |
| - Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output |
| separator and do not output trailing semicola. |
| |
| - Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named |
| ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not |
| match the Content-Length header. |
| |
| - Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings. |
| |
| - Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers |
| even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in |
| correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code. |
| |
| - Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb. |
| |
| - Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py. |
| |
| - Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath |
| to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath. |
| |
| - Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus |
| __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking |
| Tkdnd. |
| |
| - Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and |
| docstrings to either "article number" or "message id". |
| |
| - Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a |
| parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None". |
| |
| - textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2). |
| Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly). |
| |
| - urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code |
| to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944. |
| |
| - Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom, |
| as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors. |
| |
| - Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module |
| it can be missing in embedded interpreters |
| |
| - Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib. |
| |
| - Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via |
| error messages. |
| |
| - Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code. |
| |
| - The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors. |
| Bug #1224621. |
| |
| - The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full |
| roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition, |
| the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that |
| terminates by raising StopIteration. |
| |
| - Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor. |
| |
| - Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first |
| component of the path. |
| |
| - Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent, |
| support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set |
| to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper |
| class at all. |
| |
| - distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution |
| files to PyPI. |
| |
| - distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting |
| them to PyPI. |
| |
| - decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented |
| instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This |
| allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them |
| work as expected. |
| |
| - Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to |
| hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError. |
| |
| - Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the |
| stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r. |
| |
| - Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile. |
| |
| - Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing |
| to build. |
| |
| - Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring |
| symbolic links on Windows. |
| |
| - Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in |
| profile.py if available. |
| |
| - Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py. |
| |
| - Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values |
| in LWPCookieJar. |
| |
| - Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests. |
| |
| - Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder. |
| |
| - Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush. |
| |
| - Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject. |
| |
| - Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands. |
| |
| - Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands. |
| |
| - Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False. |
| |
| - Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583. |
| |
| - Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This |
| disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can |
| be exploited in various ways. |
| |
| - Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec |
| flags on the HTTP listening socket. |
| |
| - Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large. |
| Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read(). |
| |
| - Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of |
| SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler. |
| |
| - Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again. |
| |
| - Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options. |
| |
| - os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience. |
| |
| - Enhancements to the csv module: |
| |
| + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better |
| reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with |
| PEP 305. |
| + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error |
| reporting. |
| + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305 |
| dictates. |
| + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters. |
| + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric |
| types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric. |
| + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields |
| to floats. |
| + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed |
| \n to be quoted). |
| + writer doublequote handling improved. |
| + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by |
| the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required |
| this, but the mechanism was unreliable). |
| + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal |
| C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects. |
| + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable. |
| + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications |
| as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects |
| without first creating a dialect class. |
| + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added - |
| previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire |
| file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported. |
| + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets |
| the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial |
| limit is 128kB. |
| + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks |
| the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not |
| the same as the number of records returned, as records can span |
| multiple lines. |
| + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC. |
| This has been fixed. |
| |
| - _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is |
| inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The |
| lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on |
| a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632. |
| |
| - The imghdr module now detects Exif files. |
| |
| - StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute. |
| (Bug #951915). |
| |
| - locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using |
| Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale |
| alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's |
| encoding alias table. |
| |
| - moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache. |
| |
| - the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the |
| args tuple returned by __reduce__(). |
| |
| - optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py. |
| |
| - the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter. |
| |
| - the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter. |
| |
| - the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method. |
| |
| - the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument. |
| |
| - unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully |
| extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would |
| be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905). |
| |
| - heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with |
| the same meaning as in list.sort(). |
| |
| - Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only |
| once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the |
| tokenizer with very long source lines. |
| |
| - Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately |
| after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls. |
| |
| - The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The |
| reconvert module now has some simple documentation. |
| |
| - ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in |
| ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__`` |
| |
| - Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05") |
| correctly. |
| |
| - Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by |
| ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more |
| character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper |
| line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split |
| between two lines. |
| |
| - Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain |
| about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error |
| handlers. |
| |
| - Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads |
| from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct |
| encoding instead of a unicode string. |
| |
| - Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than |
| considering it exactly like a '*'. |
| |
| - Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to |
| ``encodings.aliases``. |
| |
| - ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames. |
| |
| Build |
| ----- |
| |
| - Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary |
| value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0. |
| |
| - Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security |
| vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2. |
| |
| - EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler |
| flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to |
| distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during |
| compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils. |
| |
| - SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance, |
| and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic |
| no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right. |
| |
| - Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again. |
| |
| - spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is |
| defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X. |
| |
| - setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option |
| and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include |
| directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has |
| led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes |
| the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since |
| the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink, |
| ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for |
| Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts). |
| |
| - Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone |
| to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec). |
| Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined. |
| Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond. |
| |
| |
| C API |
| ----- |
| |
| - Added a C API for set and frozenset objects. |
| |
| - Removed PyRange_New(). |
| |
| - Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the |
| mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values |
| greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined |
| mappings. |
| |
| |
| Tests |
| ----- |
| |
| - In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME. |
| |
| - Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables |
| even impatient people to run tests that require remote files. |
| |
| |
| Documentation |
| ------------- |
| |
| - Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc(). |
| |
| - Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py. |
| |
| - Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation. |
| |
| - Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S. |
| |
| - Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows. |
| |
| - Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference. |
| |
| - Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1. |
| |
| - Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag. |
| |
| - Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property(). |
| |
| - Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module. |
| Closes bug #1166582. |
| |
| - Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for |
| Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X. |
| Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen. |
| |
| Mac |
| --- |
| |
| |
| New platforms |
| ------------- |
| |
| - FreeBSD 7 support is added. |
| |
| |
| Tools/Demos |
| ----------- |
| |
| - Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively |
| finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python |
| source files that need an encoding declaration. |
| Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann. |
| |
| - Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable. |
| |
| - Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__. |
| |
| |
| What's New in Python 2.4 final? |
| =============================== |
| |
| *Release date: 30-NOV-2004* |
| |
| Core and builtins |
| ----------------- |
| |
| - Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by |
| forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when |
| things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls(). |
| |
| |
| What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1) |
| ============================================== |
| |
| *Release date: 18-NOV-2004* |
| |
| Core and builtins |
| ----------------- |
| |
| - Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced |
| the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson |
| aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now. |
| |
| |
| Library |
| ------- |
| |
| - Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an |
| attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception |
| raised is re-raised. |
| |
| - ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to |
| doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed. |
| |
| - Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``, |
| and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct |
| spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at |
| any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is |
| indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these |
| recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is |
| much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an |
| integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed |
| now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed |
| by the slice are recomputed now. |
| |
| - Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py. |
| |
| Build |
| ----- |
| |
| - Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices |
| and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile() |
| which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito. |
| |
| C API |
| ----- |
| |
| - The PyRange_New() function is deprecated. |
| |
| |
| What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2? |
| ================================ |
| |
| *Release date: 03-NOV-2004* |
| |
| License |
| ------- |
| |
| The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python |
| is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other |
| changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for |
| Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The |
| intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more |
| durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that |
| the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation |
| License:: |
| |
| http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php |
| |
| says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only |
| to Python 2.1.1. |
| |
| The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation |
| License Version 2. |
| |
| Core and builtins |
| ----------------- |
| |
| - Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that |
| calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an |
| insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via |
| running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a |
| weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread |
| that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running |
| in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible" |
| ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly |
| referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable |
| objects before allowing any callbacks to run. |
| |
| - Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value. |
| |
| Extension Modules |
| ----------------- |
| |
| - Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for |
| functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing |
| traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code |
| object was first defined rather than the function being executed. |
| |
| Library |
| ------- |
| |
| - Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that |
| no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is |
| returned. |
| |
| - Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments. |
| |
| - Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative |
| paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile(). |
| |
| - The whichdb module can now be run from the command line. |
| |
| - Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of |
| the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified. |
| |
| - Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox |
| |
| - Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode() |
| |
| - Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if |
| the source code is updated and reloaded. |
| |
| Build |
| ----- |
| |
| - Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also. |
| |
| What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1? |
| ================================ |
| |
| *Release date: 15-OCT-2004* |
| |
| Core and builtins |
| ----------------- |
| |
| - Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on |
| BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal(). |
| |
| - The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used |
| by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not |
| thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and |
| including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example. |
| |
| - Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the |
| module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.) |
| |
| - The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single |
| constant. |
| |
| - SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when |
| an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float. |
| That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very |
| large), and to anomalies such as |
| ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no |
| longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``, |
| ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed |
| correctly now. |
| |
| Extension modules |
| ----------------- |
| |
| - ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage |
| collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or |
| an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks, |
| better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque |
| comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method. |
| |
| Library |
| ------- |
| |
| - Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for |
| specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify |
| options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell |
| --swig-cpp. |
| |
| - Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if |
| it is set. |
| |
| - Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details. |
| |
| - time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific |
| strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when |
| the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)". |
| Closes bug #1039270. |
| |
| - Updates for the email package: |
| |
| + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support. |
| + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed: |
| _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(), |
| Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode() |
| + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(), |
| Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to |
| the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1. |
| + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291). |
| + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'. |
| + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be |
| added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't. |
| + Updates to documentation. |
| |
| - re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument |
| just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented |
| the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and |
| finditer() methods of regular expression objects. |
| |
| - rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers. |
| |
| - The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed; |
| applications should use the getmember function. |
| |
| - httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes. |
| |
| - SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a |
| ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day. |
| Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``, |
| ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison |
| operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the |
| base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by |
| forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g., |
| ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month |
| and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal. |
| |
| - bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch, |
| {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and |
| {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script. |
| |
| - SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support |
| decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted). |
| ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper |
| readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()`` |
| has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to |
| return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and |
| ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``. |
| Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false. |
| |
| - The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all |
| the new public features (of which there are many). |
| |
| - ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again |
| updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call |
| contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but |
| some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is |
| encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest |
| integration features instead. |
| |
| - httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs. |
| |
| - SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys, |
| processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied, |
| consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set |
| options. |
| |
| - SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in |
| ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in |
| rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing |
| ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the |
| conditions under which non-string values work. |
| |
| Build |
| ----- |
| |
| - Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for |
| building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as |
| a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/> |
| |
| - pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the |
| platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN. |
| Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform- |
| specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override |
| pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now. |
| |
| C API |
| ----- |
| |
| - SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns |
| non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called. |
| |
| - The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed. |
| |
| - The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()`` |
| are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding |
| the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645 |
| demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family |
| of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of |
| its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator |
| isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its |
| own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()`` |
| call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type. |
| |
| - PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well. |
| |
| - SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and |
| ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful |
| decoding. |
| |
| Tests |
| ----- |
| |
| - test__locale ported to unittest |
| |
| Mac |
| --- |
| |
| - ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new |
| interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)`` |
| and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)`` |
| |
| Tools/Demos |
| ----------- |
| |
| - The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now |
| read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them |
| from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that, |
| e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends |
| have no lines in common. |
| |
| |
| What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3? |
| ================================= |
| |
| *Release date: 02-SEP-2004* |
| |
| Core and builtins |
| ----------------- |
| |
| - SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name |
| list to be surrounded by parentheses. |
| |
| - Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool |
| multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool |
| squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half |
| the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation |
| uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time |
| to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due |
| to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised, |
| since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was |
| aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched |
| from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small |
| bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does |
| 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute |
| 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds. |
| |
| - OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to |
| occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default, |
| nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user |
| code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and |
| corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5. |
| |
| - Py_InitializeEx has been added. |
| |
| - Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up; |
| the first decorator listed is the last one called. |
| |
| - SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while |
| calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function |
| modified the list. |
| |
| - The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined |
| functions is now writable. |
| |
| - code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently |
| carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls |
| to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case |
| that the returned code object might be entirely insane. |
| |
| - Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of |
| interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for |
| example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string |
| via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt |
| to intern a string subclass will have no effect. |
| |
| - Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented |
| what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly. |
| |
| Extension modules |
| ----------------- |
| |
| - difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff. |
| |
| - os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random |
| data. |
| |
| - Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the |
| position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original |
| StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was |
| supposed to have been truncated away. |
| |
| - Added socket.socketpair(). |
| |
| - Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber |
| members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object. |
| |
| - The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier |
| versions of Python, have now been removed. |
| |
| Library |
| ------- |
| |
| - Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using |
| heuristics for filtering out imported names. |
| |
| - Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken |
| symlinks, unlike os.path.exists(). |
| |
| - the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available. |
| Added a new generator based on os.urandom(). |
| |
| - difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML. |
| |
| - bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and |
| replaces - by ``_`` in version and release. |
| |
| - distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the |
| path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts. |
| |
| - PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module. |
| |
| - tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default. |
| |
| - HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method. |
| |
| - Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon |
| Percivall. |
| |
| - logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed; |
| the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp. |
| |
| - A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing |
| font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument |
| which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather |
| than creating a new one. |
| |
| - Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the |
| latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification. |
| Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign |
| and exponent. |
| |
| - The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies. |
| |
| - Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc |
| attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit |
| will just become the one preferred way to do it. |
| |
| - patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions |
| to the readline module. |
| |
| - bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods |
| of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer |
| frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around. |
| |
| - bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the |
| path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it |
| contains symlinks. |
| |
| - bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a |
| file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball. |
| |
| - bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath() |
| so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is |
| reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers. |
| |
| - doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of |
| this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now |
| deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the |
| isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble |
| "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what |
| you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration |
| already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the |
| new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by |
| hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the |
| start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If |
| you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used |
| to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by |
| any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance. |
| |
| - Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)). |
| |
| Tools/Demos |
| ----------- |
| |
| - IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that |
| Control-V works the same as Control-v. |
| |
| - pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format. |
| |
| Build |
| ----- |
| |
| - Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time |
| error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't |
| divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new |
| 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the |
| restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by |
| falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no |
| plans to do so. |
| |
| - bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no |
| attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs. |
| |
| - The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the |
| processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms. |
| |
| - patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match |
| GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings. |
| |
| - Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on |
| GNU/k*BSD systems. |
| |
| - bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings |
| found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64. |
| |
| C API |
| ----- |
| |
| .. |
| |
| Documentation |
| ------------- |
| |
| - patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain |
| an underscore when viewed with Acrobat. |
| |
| - bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if |
| it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment |
| since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well. |
| |
| New platforms |
| ------------- |
| |
| - FreeBSD 6 is now supported. |
| |
| Tests |
| ----- |
| |
| .. |
| |
| Windows |
| ------- |
| |
| - Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from |
| the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough |
| bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams |
| within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were |
| able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program |
| test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows |
| "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any |
| kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be |
| the problem. |
| |
| Mac |
| --- |
| |
| .. |
| |
| |
| What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2? |
| ================================= |
| |
| *Release date: 05-AUG-2004* |
| |
| Core and builtins |
| ----------------- |
| |
| - Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements |
| of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations. |
| Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance |
| sensitive code. |
| |
| - PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are |
| implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so:: |
| |
| @staticmethod |
| def foo(bar): |
| |
| (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state) |
| |
| - When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M |
| in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would |
| succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much |
| of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised. |
| Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially- |
| initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad |
| trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state, |
| arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent |
| imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the |
| source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later |
| attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception). |
| |
| This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably |
| working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of |
| breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged |
| module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests |
| deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from |
| sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an |
| unconditional del sys.modules[M]. |
| |
| - u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to |
| obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found. |
| |
| - Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to |
| PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman. |
| |
| - Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode() |
| methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode() |
| which was missing for no apparent reason. |
| |
| - An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with |
| signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour. |
| It's quite possible that there are still bugs here. |
| |
| - Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of |
| types that support garbage collection. |
| |
| - Compiler now treats None as a constant. |
| |
| - The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__, |
| __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type |
| will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of |
| Jython. |
| |
| - Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module. |
| |
| - Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split |
| and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales. |
| |
| - Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and |
| the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension |
| module. |
| |
| - Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode |
| now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This |
| allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly. |
| |
| Extension modules |
| ----------------- |
| |
| - cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle. |
| |
| Library |
| ------- |
| |
| - Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and |
| TIS-620 |
| |
| - Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and |
| many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now |
| the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage. |
| The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior |
| (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual |
| output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected |
| output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context |
| diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to |
| normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an |
| ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output. |
| |
| - Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options. |
| |
| - The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(), |
| and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the |
| same as when the argument is omitted). |
| [SF bug 658254, patch 663482] |
| |
| - nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file. |
| |
| - urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication |
| schemes are offered. |
| |
| - Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames. |
| |
| - gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the |
| underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is |
| needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile. |
| |
| - imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights. |
| |
| - nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They |
| use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description. |
| |
| - Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being |
| raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit |
| when dummy_threading is being used. |
| |
| - Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link |
| from a tarfile. |
| |
| - Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using |
| GNU longname/longlink creation. |
| |
| - The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module |
| has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python |
| 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating |
| a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly. |
| |
| - Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004, |
| iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004. |
| |
| - Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new |
| implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time |
| Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and |
| Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the |
| queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of |
| course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling |
| thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could |
| also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation |
| to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked |
| by some other method in progress). |
| |
| - Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the |
| case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and |
| unified_diff(), |
| |
| - Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr. |
| |
| - Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by |
| returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks |
| AM Kuchling. |
| |
| - Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the |
| drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now |
| as well. Thanks Paul Moore. |
| |
| - bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data |
| for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed |
| instead of unsigned. |
| |
| - decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are |
| no longer part of the public API. |
| |
| - codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode() |
| which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and |
| string methods of the same name). |
| |
| - Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3. |
| SF patch 945642. |
| |
| - doctest unittest integration improvements: |
| |
| o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests |
| |
| o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating |
| DocTestSuites. |
| |
| - The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects |
| that provide thread-local data. |
| |
| - Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl() |
| no longer returns spurious empty fields. |
| |
| - Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module. |
| |
| - Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions, |
| which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding, |
| as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding(). |
| |
| - optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes: |
| |
| - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string |
| "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of |
| that option's default value, or "none" if no default value. |
| |
| - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are |
| now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this |
| allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can |
| be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False). |
| |
| - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback |
| options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'. |
| |
| - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options |
| that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add |
| set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to |
| HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting. |
| |
| - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user- |
| targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If |
| you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python |
| -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from |
| http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .) |
| |
| - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for |
| wrapping help output. |
| |
| - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed |
| to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings. |
| (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.) |
| |
| C API |
| ----- |
| |
| - PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an |
| error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's |
| entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call |
| one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all |
| ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish |
| to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's |
| code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must |
| arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules. |
| PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original |
| module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that |
| its visible semantics have not changed. |
| |
| - A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented, |
| thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010). |
| |
| Documentation |
| ------------- |
| |
| - Improved the tutorial on creating types in C. |
| |
| - point out the importance of reassigning data members before |
| assigning their values |
| |
| - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh. |
| |
| - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros. |
| |
| - Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions. |
| |
| Tests |
| ----- |
| |
| - The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on |
| platforms that use the Makefile. |
| |
| - SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained |
| CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in |
| test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out. |
| |
| |
| What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1? |
| ================================= |
| |
| *Release date: 08-JUL-2004* |
| |
| Core and builtins |
| ----------------- |
| |
| - weakref.ref is now the type object also known as |
| weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style |
| class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary |
| objects now (one object instead of three). |
| |
| - Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain |
| Windows DLLs. |
| |
| - Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now |
| accept any mapping type. |
| |
| - marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces |
| a new .pyc magic. |
| |
| - Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't |
| have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always |
| be there. |
| |
| - Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be |
| the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing |
| the LC_NUMERIC category. |
| |
| - Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of |
| datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane |
| objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix. |
| |
| - Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory. |
| |
| - Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width(). |
| These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode |
| TR11. |
| |
| - Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in |
| common cases. Fixes bug #942952. |
| |
| - Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo. |
| |
| - Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check |
| new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details |
| |
| - Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string) |
| |
| - Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject |
| |
| - Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and |
| "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%. |
| |
| - Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance() |
| and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter. |
| Fixes bug #858016 . |
| |
| - Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each |
| and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the |
| methods: keys(), values(), and items(). |
| |
| - Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies |
| the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further |
| improves their performance (about 35%). |
| |
| - Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make |
| comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the |
| underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics. |
| |
| - Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create |
| intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the |
| needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in |
| advance -- this halves the time to extend the list. |
| |
| - Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system |
| realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops, |
| list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable |
| length is not known). |
| |
| - Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists, |
| overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%. |
| For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now, |
| the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space |
| utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists. |
| |
| - Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list |
| instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free(). |
| |
| - The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms |
| as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or |
| keyword arguments. |
| |
| - Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer |
| interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was |
| only possible to create from C code) has been removed. |
| |
| - Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and |
| weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all |
| cases. |
| |
| - Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy() |
| assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list |
| would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since |
| GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was |
| invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during |
| creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already |
| has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from |
| cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a |
| segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in |
| a release build. |
| |
| - input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as |
| __future__ statements. SF patch 876178. |
| |
| - Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains |
| deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued. |
| |
| - At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage |
| collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The |
| call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much |
| of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref |
| callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence |
| of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced |
| by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature |
| of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been |
| destroyed. |
| |
| - Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions |
| and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.) |
| This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by |
| PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing |
| 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that |
| changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not |
| implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to |
| hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now. |
| |
| - For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust() |
| methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill |
| character other than a space. |
| |
| - When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either |
| by the function object or by the method object, the function |
| object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that |
| that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special |
| methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is |
| really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now |
| on, all method attributes will have precedence over function |
| attributes with the same name. |
| |
| - Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback, |
| its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of |
| cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order |
| in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for |
| the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate |
| segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to |
| resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises) |
| later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc |
| had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When |
| weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those |
| weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then, |
| preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just |
| as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so |
| that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference. |
| |
| - Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection |
| happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class |
| instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build; |
| in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after). |
| This has been repaired. |
| |
| - Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__. |
| |
| - Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset(). |
| |
| - Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator |
| over a sequence. |
| |
| - Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list |
| from any iterable. |
| |
| - CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr. |
| |
| - list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse. |
| The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a |
| comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower). |
| The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the |
| sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition, |
| the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts |
| starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of |
| records with equal keys is unchanged). |
| |
| - Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not |
| usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the |
| unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type. |
| |
| - Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could |
| lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier, |
| non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the |
| freelist. |
| |
| - The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to |
| '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented. |
| |
| - complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or |
| number. |
| |
| - zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising |
| a TypeError exception. |
| |
| - obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch |
| 820195. |
| |
| - Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons. |
| When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it |
| will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639. |
| |
| - str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is |
| same as split() except that it scans the string from the end |
| working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847. |
| |
| - Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure |
| to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute |
| fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior. |
| |
| - buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to |
| the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer |
| method is called as necessary. |
| |
| - fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated |
| close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on |
| the first call. |
| |
| |
| Extension modules |
| ----------------- |
| |
| - Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in |
| getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional. |
| |
| - time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise |
| ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the |
| timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance |
| that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such |
| cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted |
| fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module |
| were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996. |
| |
| - fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified. |
| |
| - nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat(). |
| |
| - the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array, |
| sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets. |
| |
| - operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give |
| fewer false positives. |
| |
| - socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added |
| socket.error to the socket module's C API. |
| |
| - Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on |
| nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed. |
| |
| - array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing |
| scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves |
| the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations. |
| Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument |
| for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array. |
| |
| - cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes |
| the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once. |
| Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and |
| makes suitable for use with generator expressions. |
| |
| - time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument |
| are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the |
| platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly |
| break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause |
| problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug |
| #897625. |
| |
| - The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the |
| system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h> |
| |
| - Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(), |
| offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends |
| and pops on either side of the deque. |
| |
| - Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for |
| improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc. |
| |
| - The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and |
| itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor |
| functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and |
| other functions that expect a function argument. |
| |
| - socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added. |
| |
| - os.getsid was added. |
| |
| - The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as |
| struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name |
| is still supported for backwards compatibility.) |
| |
| - The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7. |
| |
| - socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added. |
| |
| - readline.clear_history was added. |
| |
| - select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments. |
| |
| - cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute. |
| |
| - The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available). |
| |
| - curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124] |
| |
| - Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X |
| |
| - Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI |
| |
| - Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624). |
| |
| - Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936). |
| |
| - random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default |
| seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so |
| that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences. |
| |
| - random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int |
| with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API |
| for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits() |
| can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly, |
| randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see |
| SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now |
| issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large. |
| |
| - itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables |
| into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function). |
| It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of |
| the Unix uniq filter. |
| |
| - itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent |
| iterators from a single iterable. |
| |
| - itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead |
| of raising a TypeError exception. |
| |
| - Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string |
| as parameter. |
| |
| Library |
| ------- |
| |
| - Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__. |
| |
| - Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects |
| the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror() |
| handler can now also be os.listdir. |
| |
| - Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during |
| interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the |
| original exception. |
| |
| - Added decimal.py per PEP 327. |
| |
| - Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a |
| "netloc" portion of a URL. |
| |
| - Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself. |
| Thanks Johannes Gijsbers. |
| |
| - Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker. |
| |
| - Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its |
| API matches math.log(). |
| |
| - Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions |
| that generate a -debuginfo.rpm |
| |
| - os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms. |
| |
| - Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command |
| on cygwin and mingw32. |
| |
| - urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly. |
| |
| - refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the |
| module. |
| |
| - The distutils install command now supports the --home option and |
| installation scheme for all platforms. |
| |
| - asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to |
| looping forever. |
| |
| - The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in |
| addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold |
| administrative files for the Subversion source control system. |
| |
| - Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP |
| clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so |
| urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies. |
| |
| - stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set(). |
| |
| - Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder |
| |
| - Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD. |
| Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected. |
| |
| - Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object |
| for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different |
| type pattern with the same value exists. |
| |
| - Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg |
| when run from the command prompt). |
| |
| - Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was |
| not taken into consideration when caching value. |
| |
| - Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and |
| default sort). |
| |
| - Added global runctx function to profile module |
| |
| - Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods. |
| |
| - The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support. |
| |
| - Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2. |
| |
| - The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases |
| first before starting to try the import of the codec module. |
| This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external |
| packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs |
| package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases |
| accordingly. |
| |
| - base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and |
| decoding standards. |
| |
| - urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that |
| implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are |
| called for all requests. |
| |
| - distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as |
| they are passed to the compiler. |
| |
| - pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters |
| indent, width and depth. |
| |
| - Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple |
| and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__(). |
| |
| - Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6 |
| compiler because of incomplete registry entries. |
| |
| - httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding. |
| |
| - Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages |
| |
| - imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added. |
| |
| - Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of |
| os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible. |
| |
| - bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations |
| for better performance. |
| |
| - heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest(). |
| |
| - traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns |
| a string). |
| |
| - xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added. |
| |
| - poplib.POP3_SSL has been added. |
| |
| - tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative. |
| |
| - urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant. |
| |
| - The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now |
| optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the |
| list of fieldnames. |
| |
| - encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression |
| using "a long string".encode('bz2') |
| |
| - Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS. |
| |
| - dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning |
| empty lists. |
| |
| - The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and |
| mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries |
| and shelves. |
| |
| - The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword |
| arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation. |
| |
| - The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing |
| CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter |
| parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes. |
| |
| - sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions |
| for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to |
| allow any iterable. |
| |
| - _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most |
| recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive |
| patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe. |
| |
| - random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3 |
| and removed in Py2.4. |
| |
| - Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again. |
| |
| - Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs. |
| |
| Tools/Demos |
| ----------- |
| |
| - A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that |
| makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler. |
| |
| - The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files. |
| |
| - The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed. |
| It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with |
| db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by |
| destination in situations where both files are given. |
| |
| - The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for |
| modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation |
| base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can |
| be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable. |
| |
| - texcheck.py now detects double word errors. |
| |
| - md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a |
| silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again |
| opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags |
| remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default |
| now. |
| |
| - py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is |
| in effect |
| |
| - py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to |
| C-c C-h |
| |
| - Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no |
| -d option was given. |
| |
| Build |
| ----- |
| |
| - Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework |
| build under OS X. |
| |
| - Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with |
| --enable-profiling. |
| |
| - Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python |
| is configured --with-tsc. |
| |
| - In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use |
| on AMD64. |
| |
| - Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect |
| getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support. |
| |
| - Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was |
| removed. |
| |
| - Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer |
| supported (see PEP 11). |
| |
| - Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11). |
| |
| - Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11). |
| |
| - Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed |
| (see PEP 11). |
| |
| - Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that |
| sizeof(char) must be 1. |
| |
| C API |
| ----- |
| |
| - Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API |
| containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the |
| Python/C API Reference Manual for details. |
| |
| - Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python |
| timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds |
| checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be |
| good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there. |
| |
| - New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose |
| generator objects. |
| |
| - New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the |
| functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for |
| runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob |
| Ippolito. |
| |
| - Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's |
| underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping. |
| |
| - Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded |
| even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__ |
| method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This |
| is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls |
| whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined. |
| |
| - Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like |
| PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes |
| about 10% faster. |
| |
| - Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE. |
| Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them. |
| |
| - Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a |
| variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke |
| the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c) |
| is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c). |
| |
| Windows |
| ------- |
| |
| - The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry |
| values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is |
| uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n), |
| as appropriate, followed by a size check. |
| |
| - file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update |
| (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before |
| the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631. |
| |
| |
| What's New in Python 2.3 final? |
| =============================== |
| |
| *Release date: 29-Jul-2003* |
| |
| IDLE |
| ---- |
| |
| - Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer. |
| This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to |
| the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE" |
| context-menu actions. |
| |
| - IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall" |
| kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their |
| own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking |
| on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not |
| visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received |
| from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE, |
| asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes, |
| and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking |
| place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start. |
| |
| |
| What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2? |
| ============================================= |
| |
| *Release date: 24-Jul-2003* |
| |
| Core and builtins |
| ----------------- |
| |
| - It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional |
| data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a |
| comment at the end are still unsupported. |
| |
| Extension modules |
| ----------------- |
| |
| - A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause |
| fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more |
| than once. This has been fixed. |
| |
| - Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method |
| with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type |
| caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every |
| call. |
| |
| - Fixed some leaks in the locale module. |
| |
| Library |
| ------- |
| |
| - Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly |
| uses the first Python interpreter on your path. |
| |
| - Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to |
| fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch |
| was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not |
| restored. |
| |
| IDLE |
| ---- |
| |
| - Calltips patches. |
| |
| Build |
| ----- |
| |
| - For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion |
| on Panther (OSX 10.3). |
| |
| C API |
| ----- |
| |
| Windows |
| ------- |
| |
| - The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK |
| was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired. |
| |
| - Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin. |
| |
| Mac |
| --- |
| |
| - Various fixes to pimp. |
| |
| - Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access. |
| |
| - Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes |
| more problems than it solves. |
| |
| |
| What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1? |
| ============================================= |
| |
| *Release date: 18-Jul-2003* |
| |
| Core and builtins |
| ----------------- |
| |
| - The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set |
| by sys.setcheckinterval(). |
| |
| - Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been |
| fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without |
| reporting an error. SF patch 763201. |
| |
| - The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings |
| module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs, |
| earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could |
| not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097. |
| |
| - A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow |
| builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed. |
| |
| - It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str |
| and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3 |
| allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems. |
| |
| - The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug |
| 770247. |
| |
| - SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError. |
| |
| Extension modules |
| ----------------- |
| |
| - weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects |
| defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError. |
| |
| - SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects. |
| |
| - On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files. |
| |
| - time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation |
| contained within the _strptime module. |
| |
| - The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was |
| not consistent with the object's repr slot. |
| |
| - The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not |
| character or block devices. SF patch 708374. |
| |
| - The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse |
| the find_class attribute, if present. |
| |
| - There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module. |
| |
| bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor |
| (SF bug 763298). |
| |
| The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take |
| a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in |
| addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising |
| an exception. |
| |
| A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash. |
| |
| Library |
| ------- |
| |
| - distutils now supports MSVC 7.1 |
| |
| - doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would |
| skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore |
| naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that |
| user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could |
| break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put |
| failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage |
| is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod() |
| or Tester(). |
| |
| - There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital |
| that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data |
| and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states. |
| dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the |
| database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could |
| prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to |
| get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race |
| has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve |
| can guarantee data is written to disk. |
| |
| The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint. |
| |
| - The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they |
| weren't before was an oversight. |
| |
| - The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct |
| auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime. |
| |
| - SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods |
| when there are no lines. |
| |
| - SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel |
| which could occur with Tk 8.4 |
| |
| - SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment |
| to child processes. |
| |
| - SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__. |
| |
| - SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful. |
| |
| - SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in |
| xmlrpclib. |
| |
| - SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301 |
| responses. |
| |
| - SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files |
| generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX. |
| |
| - SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as |
| -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight`` |
| is true when it should only when time.daylight is true. |
| |
| - SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be |
| used as patterns. |
| |
| - SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples |
| of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values |
| than Tk 8.3. |
| |
| - SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division. |
| |
| - The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute. |
| |
| Tools/Demos |
| ----------- |
| |
| - See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news. |
| |
| - SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories. |
| |
| - The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library. |
| |
| Build |
| ----- |
| |
| - Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696). |
| |
| - The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10. |
| |
| - An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF |
| patch 764560). |
| |
| - Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the |
| __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as |
| needed. |
| |
| C API |
| ----- |
| |
| - Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C |
| API can use it without deferring to the encodings package. |
| |
| Windows |
| ------- |
| |
| - The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never |
| checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result, |
| it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft |
| _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is |
| on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the |
| Python exception :: |
| |
| thread.error: can't start new thread |
| |
| is raised now. |
| |
| - SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in |
| use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize() |
| instead of from DLL teardown. |
| |
| Mac |
| --- |
| |
| - Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was |
| previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead |
| of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to |
| specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set |
| the executable in the bundle. |
| |
| - Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling. |
| |
| - pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed. |
| |
| - Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass |
| on Panther. |
| |
| What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2? |
| ================================ |
| |
| *Release date: 29-Jun-2003* |
| |
| Core and builtins |
| ----------------- |
| |
| - A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some |
| string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the |
| interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked |
| with the -i option. |
| |
| - list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar |
| changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014. |
| |
| - SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix |
| for SF bug 742860 (the next item). |
| |
| - SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This |
| wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict)) |
| instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another |
| thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function |
| mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't |
| present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly |
| referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict |
| invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole |
| set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow |
| the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are |
| considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all |
| that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in |
| code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior. |
| |
| - SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when |
| compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension |
| embedded in a lambda expression. |
| |
| - SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow() |
| raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong |
| in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0 |
| if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent |
| is (mathematically) an exact even integer. |
| |
| - SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must |
| return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This |
| matches the restriction on classic classes. |
| |
| - The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to |
| the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows. |
| |
| - The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight. |
| It's writable again. |
| |
| - Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and |
| tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly |
| instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is |
| preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden. |
| |
| - SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in |
| garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to |
| occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types. |
| |
| Extension modules |
| ----------------- |
| |
| - the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow |
| timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors. |
| |
| - SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in |
| user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any |
| exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise |
| specific exceptions like AttributeError. |
| |
| - cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage |
| collection. |
| |
| - mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times, |
| especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed |
| unique within a single program run. |
| |
| - thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread. |
| dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior. |
| |
| - array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative |
| to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313) |
| |
| - The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now |
| properly subclassable. |
| |
| - _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added. |
| |
| - itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented. |
| Fixes SF bug #730685. |
| |
| - the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance - |
| /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true |
| for many BSD-derived systems. |
| |
| |
| Library |
| ------- |
| |
| - Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to |
| doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two |
| primary ones: |
| |
| doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object |
| in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running |
| on that file. This is great when a doctest fails. |
| |
| doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest |
| TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which |
| runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in |
| doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests |
| in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing |
| framework features (which doctest lacks). |
| |
| - For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected |
| output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block |
| consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly |
| for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical. |
| The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module |
| constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional |
| argument. |
| |
| - ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously, |
| a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem |
| in the archive. |
| |
| - The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making |
| LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler. |
| |
| - The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch |
| 569574). |
| |
| - A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at |
| SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is |
| no more. |
| |
| - Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used |
| to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace |
| code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can |
| generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of |
| code coverage. |
| |
| - The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile() |
| that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys |
| module. A function registered with the threading module will |
| be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this |
| to provide tracing for code running in threads. |
| |
| - copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven |
| Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself |
| didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.) |
| Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304. |
| |
| - difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff(). |
| |
| - More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use |
| GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the |
| HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes |
| an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD |
| |
| - Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error |
| handling. |
| |
| - inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display |
| __doc__ of data descriptors. |
| |
| - Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class |
| in socket.py. |
| |
| - timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports. |
| |
| - urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't |
| have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like |
| inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an |
| opener with proxy support. |
| |
| - Iterators have been added for dbm keys. |
| |
| - random.Random objects can now be pickled. |
| |
| Tools/Demos |
| ----------- |
| |
| - pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics. |
| |
| - Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib. |
| |
| - diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats, |
| providing a command line interface to difflib.py. |
| |
| - texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX |
| files. |
| |
| Build |
| ----- |
| |
| - Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a |
| different root directory. |
| |
| C API |
| ----- |
| |
| - PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc |
| (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's |
| tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define |
| a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free. |
| Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a |
| segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free |
| slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type |
| (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base |
| type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type |
| is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del. |
| |
| - PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only |
| from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is |
| intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it |
| from Python. |
| |
| |
| New platforms |
| ------------- |
| |
| None this time. |
| |
| Tests |
| ----- |
| |
| - test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a |
| side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest"). |
| |
| Windows |
| ------- |
| |
| - The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1). |
| |
| - The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C: |
| drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation |
| wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive |
| usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive |
| instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines |
| where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now |
| suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the |
| directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog -- |
| that's what it's for. |
| |
| Mac |
| --- |
| |
| - There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to |
| automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop |
| goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only |
| supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version. |
| - The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the |
| toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology). |
| - The Package Manager can now update itself. |
| |
| SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied |
| ------------------------------------ |
| |
| 430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434, |
| 598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891, |
| 622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022, |
| 661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347, |
| 683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777, |
| 697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902, |
| 713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962, |
| 724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051, |
| 727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103, |
| 729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170, |
| 730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504, |
| 731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124, |
| 732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951, |
| 733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527, |
| 735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055, |
| 740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911, |
| 744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525, |
| 745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667, |
| 747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759, |
| 749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107, |
| 751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451, |
| 753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031, |
| 755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058, |
| 757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889, |
| 760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455 |
| |
| |
| What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1? |
| ================================ |
| |
| *Release date: 25-Apr-2003* |
| |
| Core and builtins |
| ----------------- |
| |
| - New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for |
| PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value. |
| |
| - New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the |
| items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers, |
| and cannot be strings). |
| |
| - bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than |
| raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the |
| constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument |
| they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135) |
| |
| - In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible |
| from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a |
| few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with |
| Python itself. |
| |
| - The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of |
| the referenced object, if it has one. |
| |
| - super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See |
| the thread started at |
| http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html |
| |
| - list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be |
| interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the |
| list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not |
| placed on a list index. |
| |
| - range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude |
| larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence |
| fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list: |
| [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.) |
| |
| - Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction |
| between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious" |
| getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method, |
| but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable |
| only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted |
| unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to |
| a segfault could happen. That's been repaired. |
| |
| - dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default |
| value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not |
| given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised. |
| Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin. |
| [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.) |
| |
| - sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose |
| Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding. |
| |
| - New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is |
| rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects |
| referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch |
| #693195.) |
| |
| - On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys |
| if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659. |
| |
| - Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static |
| variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the |
| unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive |
| interpreter executions, would fail. |
| |
| - "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a |
| TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead |
| of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127. |
| |
| Extension modules |
| ----------------- |
| |
| - The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop |
| for converting between string and packed representation of IP |
| addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is |
| True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327. |
| |
| - Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly |
| to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings. |
| |
| - The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the |
| recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron |
| and Greg Chapman.) |
| |
| - New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code |
| recursively. |
| |
| - New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects |
| directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's |
| tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory |
| leaks. |
| |
| - The iconv module has been removed from this release. |
| |
| - The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats |
| (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1 |
| pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to |
| propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f |
| could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2 |
| away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug |
| #705836. |
| |
| - New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset() |
| function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.) |
| |
| - Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions |
| on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter. |
| See SF bug #692416. |
| |
| - Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed |
| mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation). |
| |
| - Made user requested changes to the itertools module. |
| Subsumed the times() function into repeat(). |
| Added chain() and cycle(). |
| |
| - The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses |
| is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python |
| has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries. |
| |
| - The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on |
| platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly |
| on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing |
| timeouts to work properly. |
| |
| Library |
| ------- |
| |
| - New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to |
| os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk() |
| isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a |
| future release. |
| |
| - Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools |
| for querying platform dependent features. |
| |
| - netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords. |
| |
| - shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes |
| pickle protocol versions. |
| |
| - Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument |
| which specifies a file where to divert the command's output |
| (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468) |
| |
| - The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added. |
| |
| - Support for internationalized domain names has been added through |
| the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the |
| 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib |
| modules. |
| |
| - htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps |
| HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers). |
| codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017. |
| |
| - pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through |
| arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt. |
| |
| - unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now |
| return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired |
| result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__. |
| |
| - sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the |
| MS Office extensions. |
| |
| - The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol. |
| SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon. |
| |
| - New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the |
| execution speed of expressions and statements. |
| |
| - sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead |
| of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object, |
| x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made |
| for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info |
| about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug |
| report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>. |
| |
| - On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument, |
| it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier |
| to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().) |
| |
| - Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified |
| in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but |
| not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog) |
| |
| - New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files. |
| |
| - Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings, |
| including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and |
| commands. An iterator interface was also implemented. |
| |
| Tools/Demos |
| ----------- |
| |
| - New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output. |
| See the module docstring for details. |
| |
| Build |
| ----- |
| |
| - Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted |
| preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.) |
| |
| C API |
| ----- |
| |
| - Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect(). |
| |
| - PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or |
| issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This |
| makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active. |
| |
| - LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and |
| need compatibility with previous versions can use this: |
| |
| #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG |
| #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG |
| #endif |
| |
| - Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the |
| typical case where the method returns its self argument. |
| |
| - The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style |
| classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now |
| exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.) |
| |
| New platforms |
| ------------- |
| |
| None this time. |
| |
| Tests |
| ----- |
| |
| - test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run. |
| See SF bug #692988. |
| |
| Windows |
| ------- |
| |
| - os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit() |
| function. |
| |
| - New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API |
| MessageBeep(). |
| |
| Mac |
| --- |
| |
| - os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with |
| a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library". |
| |
| - A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access |
| the window manager, false otherwise. |
| |
| - EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is |
| currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground |
| before displaying. |
| |
| - OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now |
| be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less |
| complete. |
| |
| - The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation |
| in Apple Help Viewer format. |
| |
| |
| What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2? |
| ================================= |
| |
| *Release date: 19-Feb-2003* |
| |
| Core and builtins |
| ----------------- |
| |
| - Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now |
| treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions |
| that are out of bounds raise an IndexError. |
| |
| - sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now |
| turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string. |
| (SF patch #664376.) |
| |
| - Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending |
| with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError. |
| This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except |
| codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be |
| invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior; |
| this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py |
| files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.) |
| |
| - If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its |
| constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the |
| constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code |
| that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op |
| __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``. |
| |
| - Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know |
| Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants |
| with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign. |
| ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the |
| range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have |
| always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.) |
| E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would |
| come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through |
| 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that |
| value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This |
| will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455) |
| |
| - int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only |
| does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the |
| sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit |
| machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python |
| 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and |
| int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347) |
| |
| - super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e. |
| issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X). |
| |
| - isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent |
| to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously |
| only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the |
| case.) |
| |
| - compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code |
| passed as unicode strings. |
| |
| - int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int. |
| See SF bug #683467. |
| |
| - long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power |
| of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string). |
| |
| - filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments. |
| |
| - raw_input can now return Unicode objects. |
| |
| - List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function. |
| Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no |
| arguments. |
| |
| - Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self. |
| See SF bug #667147. |
| |
| - Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying |
| to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit. |
| See SF bug #676155. |
| |
| - Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to |
| the name of the module in which the function was defined. This |
| applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods |
| defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(), |
| which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2 |
| whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined |
| at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions). |
| Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name. |
| |
| Extension modules |
| ----------------- |
| |
| - operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or |
| nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL |
| tp_as_number pointer. |
| |
| - The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import |
| lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a |
| reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when |
| this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with |
| imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.) |
| |
| - Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307). |
| |
| - Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518. |
| |
| - Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib |
| extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the |
| zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and |
| patch #678531.) |
| |
| - Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient |
| looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML. |
| |
| - The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF |
| patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552). |
| |
| - os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends). |
| |
| - Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal |
| errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background |
| thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.) |
| |
| - fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants. |
| |
| - Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on |
| an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913) |
| |
| - Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation. |
| |
| - datetime changes: |
| |
| The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908) |
| |
| The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single |
| datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single |
| time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted |
| exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't |
| enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler |
| now. |
| |
| today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest |
| microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an |
| irritation most likely seen on Windows systems. |
| |
| In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration, |
| ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it |
| as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in |
| time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports |
| DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes, |
| meaning that DST is never in effect). |
| |
| The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object |
| (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that |
| was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein |
| they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI. |
| |
| The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced |
| by a later example coded by Guido. |
| |
| datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the |
| input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time |
| zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight |
| time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time |
| ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics |
| the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time. |
| |
| dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware |
| datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo |
| object, without any conversion of date and time members, use |
| dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a |
| tzinfo subclass instance. |
| |
| A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses |
| to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to |
| a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc() |
| as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding |
| fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will |
| be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the |
| creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc() |
| allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python. |
| |
| datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's |
| repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough |
| already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date |
| and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time |
| members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current |
| date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to :: |
| |
| tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc)) |
| |
| where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without |
| a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time, |
| as a naive datetime object. |
| |
| datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than |
| useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See |
| also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>. |
| |
| date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from |
| falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these |
| raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type. |
| They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute, |
| in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other |
| datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the |
| comparison. |
| |
| date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception |
| for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if |
| the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is |
| != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator |
| only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, :: |
| |
| if some_datetime in some_sequence: |
| |
| and :: |
| |
| some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever |
| |
| to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the |
| sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This |
| seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons |
| that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.] |
| |
| The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise |
| ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap |
| seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's |
| possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where |
| datetimes constructed from them are equal. |
| |
| The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed |
| completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no |
| longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__() |
| methods no longer exist either. |
| |
| Library |
| ------- |
| |
| - The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed |
| to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning(). |
| |
| - The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling |
| protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several |
| extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__ |
| etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization |
| API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__. |
| See PEP 307 for details. |
| |
| - The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi |
| as the default repository. (See PEP 301.) |
| |
| - the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep, |
| pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform |
| dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these |
| variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be |
| available from the os module. |
| (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>). |
| |
| - array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see |
| <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>). |
| |
| - The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle |
| internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as |
| a symbolic pickle disassembler. |
| |
| - Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type. |
| |
| - py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError |
| exception. |
| |
| - SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler |
| class. |
| |
| - The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that |
| sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison |
| operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests. |
| |
| - Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in |
| Python 2.2. or 2.3. |
| |
| - realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``. |
| It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath. |
| See SF bug #659228. |
| |
| - New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface |
| to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression. |
| See SF patch #651082. |
| |
| - urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024. |
| |
| - Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support |
| the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259. |
| |
| - Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets. |
| See SF patch #642974. |
| |
| - The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating |
| DOS paths from other platforms. |
| |
| Tools/Demos |
| ----------- |
| |
| - Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the |
| Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module |
| to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is |
| compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the |
| underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library, |
| run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it |
| to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script |
| using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For |
| example: |
| |
| % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle |
| % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle |
| |
| Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message. |
| |
| |
| Build |
| ----- |
| |
| - The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and |
| test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is |
| because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and |
| software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like :: |
| |
| ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev |
| |
| - On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which |
| used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two |
| groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and |
| debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry |
| compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some |
| platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by |
| default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required |
| flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without |
| fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build. |
| |
| - On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the |
| relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to |
| take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project |
| <http://fink.sf.net/>. |
| |
| - A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts |
| from the Tools/scripts directory. |
| |
| C API |
| ----- |
| |
| - PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *`` |
| instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.) |
| |
| - PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float |
| slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL |
| tp_as_number pointer. |
| |
| - A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer |
| will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one. |
| (SF #681367) |
| |
| - The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float |
| argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b', |
| 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will |
| raise a TypeError. |
| |
| Tests |
| ----- |
| |
| - Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py, |
| test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py, |
| test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to |
| developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to |
| make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or |
| pydoc.) |
| |
| - Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module. |
| |
| - Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding. |
| |
| Windows |
| ------- |
| |
| - The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has |
| now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the |
| time). |
| |
| - distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to |
| the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198. |
| |
| - The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest |
| release without strong cryptography. |
| |
| - sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an |
| absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.) |
| |
| - The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It |
| wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight. |
| |
| Mac |
| --- |
| |
| - There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave |
| and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated. |
| |
| - Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference |
| of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules |
| in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future. |
| |
| - Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented. |
| This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again. |
| |
| - There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and |
| accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download |
| and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary |
| form. Only in MacPython-OSX. |
| |
| - Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make |
| them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The |
| downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the |
| Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1. |
| |
| |
| What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1? |
| ================================= |
| |
| *Release date: 31-Dec-2002* |
| |
| Type/class unification and new-style classes |
| -------------------------------------------- |
| |
| - One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes. |
| |
| - dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2) |
| is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly, |
| the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has |
| been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has |
| a different meaning than before. |
| |
| - int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the |
| integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will |
| all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError. |
| |
| - Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new |
| class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an |
| extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool. |
| |
| - New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up |
| significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation |
| and deallocation. |
| |
| - The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the |
| right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]). |
| |
| - The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The |
| types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and |
| instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in |
| names but are accessible through the types module, are now also |
| callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy. |
| |
| - Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are |
| now detected by the garbage collector. |
| |
| - Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected. |
| [SF bug 519621] |
| |
| - Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python |
| identifier. |
| |
| - The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and |
| takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor |
| ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a |
| module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this |
| created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did. |
| [SF bug 563060] |
| |
| - A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type |
| for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of |
| types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string": |
| isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This |
| is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly. |
| |
| - Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__ |
| method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is |
| not called. [SF bug #537450] |
| |
| - Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444] |
| |
| - If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but |
| doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised. |
| This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always |
| raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the |
| state of the slots would be lost.) |
| |
| Core and builtins |
| ----------------- |
| |
| - Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed |
| on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python |
| modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the |
| zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not |
| the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are |
| compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since |
| Jython 2.1. |
| |
| - PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to |
| support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism. |
| Several new variables have been added to the sys module: |
| sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these |
| make extending the import statement much more convenient than |
| overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of |
| these, see PEP 302. |
| |
| - A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a |
| trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to |
| exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835] |
| |
| - The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin |
| module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available |
| to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263. |
| |
| - issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like |
| isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to |
| ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``. |
| |
| - Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash |
| by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list |
| during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of |
| attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or |
| length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language. |
| The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations, |
| and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that |
| all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across |
| releases or implementations. |
| |
| - Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented. |
| All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute, |
| which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere. |
| |
| - Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented. |
| Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized. |
| |
| - A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern(): |
| interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference |
| to the return value intern() around to get the benefit. |
| |
| - Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now |
| issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword. |
| |
| - SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to |
| call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call |
| PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up |
| to date when there is a trace function set). |
| |
| - There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn |
| about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer |
| result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer |
| unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that |
| PEP. The warnings are about the following situations: |
| |
| - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range |
| [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but |
| in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit |
| pattern. |
| |
| - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose |
| bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be |
| precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value |
| as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n. |
| |
| - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as |
| unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; |
| this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string |
| formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will |
| show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff"; |
| in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1"). |
| |
| - The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have |
| been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be |
| per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables. |
| In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100 |
| bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that |
| relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded |
| applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will |
| increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount. |
| |
| - When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called |
| Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the |
| inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits, |
| Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is |
| log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may |
| be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides |
| the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm |
| appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers |
| (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a |
| simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with, |
| e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package |
| devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it. |
| |
| - u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an |
| integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals. |
| |
| - The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The |
| mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are |
| mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the |
| higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile(). |
| Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the |
| new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same |
| functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe |
| interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks |
| to Zack Weinberg! |
| |
| - When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__, |
| 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously |
| invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int |
| type. This has been fixed now. |
| |
| - Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1. |
| This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of |
| any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now. |
| |
| - File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now |
| returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to |
| f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a |
| readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing |
| f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right. |
| Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations |
| don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost |
| to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding |
| module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh! |
| |
| - Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A |
| comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first |
| or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding. |
| |
| - list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results |
| may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many |
| kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation, |
| and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on |
| several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A |
| precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too), |
| although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A |
| potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of |
| len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible |
| for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function |
| does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details. |
| |
| - All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been |
| raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also |
| raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to |
| this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program |
| breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an |
| iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce |
| this.) |
| |
| - Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with |
| other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught, |
| and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the |
| process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will |
| interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes |
| created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work |
| reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.) |
| [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232] |
| |
| - sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This |
| returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows |
| currently running. |
| |
| - Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return |
| a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time, |
| but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count |
| was one or when the slice range was all inclusive. |
| |
| - Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated |
| as directory names. |
| |
| - Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods |
| so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951] |
| |
| - Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the |
| finally clause. [SF bug 567538] |
| |
| - Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices |
| with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1] |
| gives "dlrow olleh". |
| |
| - A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide |
| direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated. |
| The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending |
| deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning:: |
| as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code. |
| |
| - Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as |
| promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist() |
| method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been |
| removed. |
| |
| - New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example: |
| enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c"). |
| The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object. |
| |
| - The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means |
| that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value |
| to __debug__. |
| |
| - A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric |
| string to the left with zeros. For example, |
| "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123". |
| |
| - Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but |
| these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being |
| deprecated now. |
| |
| - String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take |
| an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For |
| example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo". |
| |
| - There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict |
| class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a |
| dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a |
| single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing |
| duplicates from sequences. |
| |
| - Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the |
| value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949] |
| |
| - A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in |
| names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry |
| other operations that return a truth value have been changed to |
| return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this |
| is backward compatible. |
| |
| - Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions, |
| deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the |
| garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code; |
| access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable |
| could access a pointer to freed memory. |
| |
| - The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by |
| default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and |
| deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included, |
| Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions |
| and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2 |
| onwards. |
| |
| - PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions |
| that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors. |
| |
| - The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates |
| correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones. |
| |
| - Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U' |
| instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line |
| ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is |
| recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to |
| '\n', the standard Python line end character. |
| |
| - file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed: |
| Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise |
| a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called. |
| |
| - sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument. |
| An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used. |
| |
| - Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the |
| general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will |
| evaluate f1 first. |
| |
| - Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read() |
| could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error. |
| |
| - The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat |
| slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots. |
| This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807). |
| |
| - Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945). |
| |
| Extension modules |
| ----------------- |
| |
| - Added three operators to the operator module: |
| operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b. |
| operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b. |
| operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b. |
| |
| - posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx. |
| |
| - A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip |
| archives. |
| |
| - The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and |
| times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and |
| favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See |
| |
| http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage |
| |
| - _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which |
| have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects |
| are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method, |
| or Tkinter.wantobjects. |
| |
| - The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has |
| been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is |
| still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore, |
| and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from |
| 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which |
| probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see |
| the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos |
| section above. |
| |
| - unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization |
| and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs. |
| |
| - resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints. |
| |
| - readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if |
| sys.stdin/stdout changes. |
| |
| - The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for |
| Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are |
| supported. |
| |
| - cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class. |
| |
| - The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers |
| after stat_float_times has been called. |
| |
| - If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the |
| file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792] |
| |
| - The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence. |
| |
| - The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a |
| Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it). |
| |
| - The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that |
| only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer |
| functions but callable type objects. |
| |
| - The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename. |
| This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be |
| written to disk. |
| |
| - posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and |
| posix.getpgid have been added where available. |
| |
| - The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It |
| also has a new function getpreferredencoding. |
| |
| - A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular |
| third party compression library used by some Python modules. The |
| hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of |
| Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4. |
| |
| - pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic |
| field names. |
| |
| - array.array is now a type object. A new format character |
| 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and |
| .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__ |
| and __imul__. |
| |
| - dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case |
| of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open |
| is called. |
| |
| - The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates |
| to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the |
| interpreter was compiled. |
| |
| - Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab') |
| when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now |
| returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of |
| lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example, |
| when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be |
| 1, not 2. |
| |
| - Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit |
| before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite |
| loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer |
| limit. |
| |
| - The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the |
| letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes |
| bug #623464. |
| |
| - The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by |
| ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of |
| OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the |
| OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2. |
| |
| Library |
| ------- |
| |
| - imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder). |
| |
| - Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library; |
| slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule |
| reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow |
| with Python 2.3a2. |
| |
| - os.path exposes getctime. |
| |
| - unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual() |
| and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison |
| by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing |
| the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for |
| unit tests of floating point results. |
| |
| - calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than |
| the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates |
| has been increased. |
| |
| - pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be |
| executed. |
| |
| - The distutils created windows installers now can run a |
| postinstallation script. |
| |
| - doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to |
| test the current module. |
| |
| - When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard |
| interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on |
| client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to |
| the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that |
| this behavior needs to be controlled. |
| |
| - A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for |
| command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg |
| Ward's Optik package. |
| |
| - UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary |
| methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface. |
| This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable |
| for dictionaries (such as the shelve module). |
| |
| - shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports |
| all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent |
| storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind. |
| |
| - shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional |
| binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the |
| shelf are binary pickles. |
| |
| - A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP |
| 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip. |
| |
| - StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs |
| modules are iterators now. |
| |
| - gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work |
| now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large |
| file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can |
| record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that |
| some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file |
| size. |
| |
| - xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references |
| with their entity value. |
| |
| - Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument. |
| |
| - Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple |
| option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s. |
| |
| - Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that |
| tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a |
| dictionary when invoked with no argument. |
| |
| - Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of |
| calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or |
| whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you |
| want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve |
| all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the |
| following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's |
| main(): |
| |
| import locale |
| locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "") |
| |
| - shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an |
| exception at the end, instead of printing error messages. |
| |
| - Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only |
| replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric |
| characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python |
| package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated |
| to the new standard. |
| |
| - mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which |
| returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and |
| add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and |
| an extension to the database. |
| |
| - New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable |
| set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's |
| also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets |
| or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which |
| is the base class of the two. |
| |
| - Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement. |
| Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population. |
| |
| - random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises |
| OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start' |
| and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's |
| bounded integers. |
| |
| - Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core |
| generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C, |
| threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically |
| large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit |
| precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator |
| in existence. |
| |
| The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new |
| generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the |
| existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead() |
| continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of |
| non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies |
| on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward. |
| |
| The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for |
| the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a |
| new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward |
| compatibility and to make an alternate generator available. |
| |
| - New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to |
| Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining |
| write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps. |
| |
| - New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos. |
| |
| - binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit |
| platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs, |
| crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value |
| as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform. |
| |
| - xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding |
| argument. |
| |
| - Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its |
| __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on |
| the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of |
| custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type' |
| [SF patch 560794]. |
| |
| - Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is |
| a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception |
| if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout |
| mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function, |
| socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets |
| created henceforth. |
| |
| - getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option |
| processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments. |
| |
| - Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for |
| exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects |
| changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error, |
| tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error. |
| |
| - Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE, |
| BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte |
| Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and |
| big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names |
| BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2. |
| |
| - Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians(). |
| |
| - math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]). |
| |
| - ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing |
| for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which |
| was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may |
| create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior |
| and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not |
| identical to None. |
| |
| - random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else, |
| and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other |
| words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of |
| results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly |
| mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different |
| results now. |
| |
| - The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that |
| provided by cPickle.Pickler. |
| |
| - difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of |
| which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For |
| comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better |
| than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk |
| argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is |
| that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied |
| to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program |
| text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines). |
| |
| - New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module. |
| |
| - New distutils commands for building packagers were added to |
| support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX. |
| |
| - distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class |
| command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers. |
| This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage |
| people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD |
| and other systems. |
| |
| - The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a |
| NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they |
| used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error -- |
| UTF-16 is a 2-byte encoding and the C lib's line reading APIs don't |
| work well with these. |
| |
| - compileall now supports quiet operation. |
| |
| - The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent |
| connections. |
| |
| - socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main |
| _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper |
| which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working. |
| |
| - encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character |
| sets |
| |
| - ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use |
| "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host |
| name. |
| |
| - webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that |
| arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was |
| passed in. |
| |
| - gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and |
| gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback |
| on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means |
| of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext. |
| |
| - distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option. |
| |
| - warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument. |
| |
| - The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create |
| circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed |
| to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474] |
| |
| - The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless |
| of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF, |
| or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments |
| has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always |
| honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified. |
| |
| - distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++ |
| compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if |
| running under \*nix. |
| |
| - New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression |
| library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression |
| functions, and types for sequential (de)compression. |
| |
| - New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints |
| the value of its expression argument. |
| |
| - Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in |
| the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in |
| the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file. |
| |
| - Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a |
| unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for |
| skipstone browser was included. |
| |
| - Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of |
| strings were used as parameters for certain functions. |
| |
| Tools/Demos |
| ----------- |
| |
| - pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module |
| names in addition to accepting file names. |
| |
| - The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they |
| were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions |
| are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are |
| still used and useful.) |
| |
| - IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also |
| deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It |
| allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them |
| in the locale's encoding. |
| |
| - freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules, |
| unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in |
| the generated binary. |
| |
| Build |
| ----- |
| |
| - On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically. |
| |
| - The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless |
| except in the hands of experts. |
| |
| - The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC |
| and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions |
| will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros |
| are deprecated. |
| |
| - A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or |
| get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected. |
| Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires |
| that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that |
| COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug |
| builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS |
| builds. |
| |
| - Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option. |
| The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges |
| that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules |
| that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension |
| type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the |
| Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used |
| to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the |
| new type. |
| |
| - According to Annex F of the current C standard, |
| |
| The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs, |
| HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are |
| positive infinities. |
| |
| Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol |
| Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL. |
| pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered |
| other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines |
| HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something |
| that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about |
| is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here: |
| |
| http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm |
| |
| Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help! |
| |
| - The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the |
| doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the |
| size of the executable. |
| |
| - The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix |
| it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the |
| configure script. On other platforms, remove |
| WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h. |
| |
| - On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared. |
| |
| - All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS |
| preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they |
| controlled stopped being experimental long ago. |
| |
| - The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as |
| well as Unix. |
| |
| - The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version |
| skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the |
| installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these |
| modules in the README file for details. |
| |
| C API |
| ----- |
| |
| - PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects. |
| This is a result of these types having a partially defined |
| tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that |
| PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior. |
| It may be deprecated.) |
| |
| - The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member |
| ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some |
| platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of |
| the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been |
| incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned |
| strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned |
| strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API, |
| PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings. |
| (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while |
| making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in |
| it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer |
| aligned.) |
| |
| - The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods' |
| argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common |
| now that factories can be types rather than functions. |
| |
| - New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C |
| level. |
| |
| - New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and |
| PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to |
| PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and |
| PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify |
| the exception type to raise. Available on Windows. |
| |
| - Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It |
| was previously declared without const. This should not affect working |
| code. |
| |
| - Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls |
| sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without |
| adjusting for negative indices. |
| |
| - PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1. |
| This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange |
| object. |
| |
| - PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's |
| coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the |
| CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies. |
| |
| - The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to |
| "``void (*)(void *)``". |
| |
| - PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros. |
| |
| - A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously, |
| when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it |
| was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type, |
| where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type. |
| |
| - PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does. |
| |
| - The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed. |
| |
| - The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is |
| without going through the buffer API. |
| |
| - The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``. |
| |
| - An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This |
| hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has |
| been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created |
| conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless. |
| |
| - Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided |
| to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish! |
| |
| - Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number |
| scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details. |
| |
| New platforms |
| ------------- |
| |
| - OpenVMS is now supported. |
| |
| - AtheOS is now supported. |
| |
| - the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported. |
| |
| - GNU/Hurd is now supported. |
| |
| Tests |
| ----- |
| |
| - The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow |
| all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything |
| except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'. |
| |
| Windows |
| ------- |
| |
| - The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the |
| Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge |
| improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many |
| bugs. |
| XXX What are the licensing issues here? |
| XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of |
| XXX Python, what must they do to convert it? |
| XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt). |
| XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1. |
| |
| - The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL) |
| module (_ssl.pyd) |
| |
| - The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it |
| previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2). |
| |
| - When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now |
| includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under |
| MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is |
| the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6. |
| |
| - Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause |
| of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in- |
| use files" uninstall option). |
| |
| - Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031] |
| |
| - The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local |
| equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install. |
| |
| - file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values. |
| It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a |
| limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used). |
| |
| - os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block |
| until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly |
| the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for |
| a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn() |
| functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms. |
| See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that |
| spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on |
| Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id). |
| |
| - New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't |
| need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune |
| to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it |
| got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the |
| underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine. |
| However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C |
| level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were |
| open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then |
| doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's |
| C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f |
| blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow |
| deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to |
| work around. |
| |
| - The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the |
| low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are |
| O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL. |
| The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT, |
| O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary |
| to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY |
| (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless |
| specified with O_CREAT too). |
| |
| Mac |
| ---- |
| |
| - Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here. |
| |
| - Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM |
| version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file |
| system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir(). |
| |
| - The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython |
| refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the |
| CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX. |
| |
| - All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build, |
| including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this |
| will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot |
| talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app |
| bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script |
| with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should |
| be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including |
| Tkinter or wxPython scripts). |
| |
| - Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in |
| MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib |
| are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc). |
| |
| - A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or |
| .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are |
| run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw |
| files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal |
| window, but all this can be customized. |
| |
| - MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and |
| possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier |
| releases. |
| |
| - Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command |
| line interface too. |
| |
| - All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can |
| subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should |
| now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's |
| documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still |
| available for convenience. |
| |
| - New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h) |
| and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is |
| gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules. |
| |
| - Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses |
| unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames |
| (also when running on Mac OS X). |
| |
| - New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager. |
| There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation |
| (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer. |
| See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a |
| Help Viewer compatible form and installing it. |
| |
| - OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now |
| mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes. |
| |
| - MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file. |
| This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278). |
| |
| - The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer |
| mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on |
| other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them |
| you can change this in site.py. |
| |
| |
| What's New in Python 2.2 final? |
| =============================== |
| |
| *Release date: 21-Dec-2001* |
| |
| Type/class unification and new-style classes |
| -------------------------------------------- |
| |
| - pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes |
| with a custom metaclass. |
| |
| Core and builtins |
| ----------------- |
| |
| - weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both |
| are proxies. |
| |
| Extension modules |
| ----------------- |
| |
| - binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding |
| very short strings. |
| |
| - cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack |
| overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion |
| limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects |
| performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT |
| when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h). |
| |
| Library |
| ------- |
| |
| - dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at |
| close or delete time). |
| |
| - rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None |
| instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module). |
| |
| - xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles. |
| |
| - test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code |
| when run from the standard regression test. |
| |
| Tools/Demos |
| ----------- |
| |
| Build |
| ----- |
| |
| C API |
| ----- |
| |
| New platforms |
| ------------- |
| |
| Tests |
| ----- |
| |
| Windows |
| ------- |
| |
| - distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst). |
| |
| - tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper |
| instances are deleted at process exit time. |
| |
| - socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are |
| deleted at process exit time. |
| |
| - posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending |
| in backslash. |
| |
| Mac |
| ---- |
| |
| - The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers |
| 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have |
| been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX. |
| |
| |
| What's New in Python 2.2c1? |
| =========================== |
| |
| *Release date: 14-Dec-2001* |
| |
| Type/class unification and new-style classes |
| -------------------------------------------- |
| |
| - Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has |
| been extensively updated. See |
| |
| http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html |
| |
| That remains the primary documentation in this area. |
| |
| - Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never |
| deleted! |
| |
| - The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called |
| __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly |
| called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition |
| with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods |
| are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.) |
| |
| - Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed: |
| |
| (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still |
| return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super). |
| |
| (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This |
| is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of |
| super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data |
| attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not |
| supported anyway. |
| |
| (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an |
| instance of the type used in creation of the super instance. |
| |
| - Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type |
| (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising |
| TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling |
| dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError |
| (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__). |
| |
| - New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for |
| all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty |
| dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further. |
| |
| Core and builtins |
| ----------------- |
| |
| - -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on |
| the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead |
| of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all" |
| means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in |
| your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in |
| educational environments with control over the libraries in use. |
| Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails |
| under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true |
| division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is |
| testing the current rules). |
| |
| - complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string |
| argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string |
| or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string. |
| |
| Extension modules |
| ----------------- |
| |
| - gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers. |
| |
| Library |
| ------- |
| |
| - Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter |
| lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done |
| this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling |
| an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads |
| until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs |
| relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design. |
| |
| - webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now. |
| |
| - Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show. |
| |
| - The charset alias windows_1252 has been added. |
| |
| - types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types; |
| usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled |
| without Unicode support it will be just (str,). |
| |
| - The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML. |
| |
| Tools/Demos |
| ----------- |
| |
| - A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires |
| off a search on Google. |
| |
| Build |
| ----- |
| |
| - Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the |
| preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent). |
| In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in |
| Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension |
| authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in |
| release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to |
| other platforms should do likewise. |
| |
| - It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a |
| case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build |
| directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python. |
| |
| C API |
| ----- |
| |
| - New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict |
| constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object |
| producing key-value pairs. |
| |
| - PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in |
| the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This |
| wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even |
| dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result, |
| PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that |
| previously went unchallenged. |
| |
| New platforms |
| ------------- |
| |
| Tests |
| ----- |
| |
| Windows |
| ------- |
| |
| Mac |
| ---- |
| |
| - In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin", |
| without any trailing digits. |
| |
| - Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons. |
| Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to |
| the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python |
| home. |
| |
| |
| What's New in Python 2.2b2? |
| =========================== |
| |
| *Release date: 16-Nov-2001* |
| |
| Type/class unification and new-style classes |
| -------------------------------------------- |
| |
| - Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the |
| list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now: |
| |
| class Classic: pass |
| class Mixed(Classic, object): pass |
| |
| The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected |
| according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed |
| using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class. |
| This needs to be documented. |
| |
| - The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have |
| been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage. |
| |
| - dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For |
| example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument, |
| and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects. |
| |
| - New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called |
| when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes). |
| |
| - Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are |
| instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base |
| class forbids it). |
| |
| - Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments |
| (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods |
| that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__. |
| |
| - The socket function has been converted to a type; see below. |
| |
| Core and builtins |
| ----------------- |
| |
| - Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This |
| was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1" |
| (see below) says. |
| |
| - Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator |
| (like 1 + ''). |
| |
| Extension modules |
| ----------------- |
| |
| - mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for |
| both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and |
| copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on |
| Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a |
| uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across |
| platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this! |
| |
| - By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in |
| unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all |
| instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized |
| to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes. |
| |
| - The socket module defines a new method for socket objects, |
| sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to |
| send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has |
| been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.) |
| before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing. |
| |
| - Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite |
| for the curses module (you have to run it manually). |
| |
| - binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57 |
| bytes on its input. |
| |
| Library |
| ------- |
| |
| - tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory |
| convenience function. |
| |
| - Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For |
| example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a |
| single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously. |
| Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time; |
| previously, the error went undetected, and results were |
| unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and |
| pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an |
| experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works |
| like findall() but returns an iterator. |
| |
| - Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox, |
| DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the |
| methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog, |
| tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions. |
| |
| - Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so |
| cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause |
| permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled). |
| |
| - os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the |
| separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except |
| RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable |
| unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS. |
| |
| - mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly |
| found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an |
| optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether |
| recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we |
| know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are |
| new -l and -e options. |
| |
| - statcache is now deprecated. |
| |
| - email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style |
| dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates |
| hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is |
| added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings |
| time properly taken into account. |
| |
| - In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by |
| transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception |
| propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__ |
| in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle. |
| |
| Tools/Demos |
| ----------- |
| |
| Build |
| ----- |
| |
| - The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module |
| is built with libdb3 if available. |
| |
| - Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement. |
| |
| C API |
| ----- |
| |
| - New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non- |
| NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling |
| PySequence_Size(). |
| |
| - New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added. |
| |
| - New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and |
| PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more |
| convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C. |
| |
| - PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's |
| possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before. |
| |
| - New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its |
| argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface. |
| |
| New platforms |
| ------------- |
| |
| - We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00, |
| *with* threads, and passes the test suite. |
| |
| - Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build |
| again under OS/2 Visual Age C++. |
| |
| - Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger. |
| |
| Tests |
| ----- |
| |
| - Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically; |
| regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it. |
| |
| Windows |
| ------- |
| |
| Mac |
| ---- |
| |
| - PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be |
| removed completely in the next release. |
| |
| - It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and |
| OSX. |
| |
| - The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side |
| result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII. |
| |
| - Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1 |
| |
| |
| What's New in Python 2.2b1? |
| =========================== |
| |
| *Release date: 19-Oct-2001* |
| |
| Type/class unification and new-style classes |
| -------------------------------------------- |
| |
| - New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and |
| extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I |
| no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic |
| remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you |
| must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the |
| __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack |
| of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the |
| future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I |
| can prove that it actually speeds things up). |
| |
| - C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it |
| always returned None, even when there was a class docstring). |
| |
| - doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes, |
| class methods, static methods, and properties. |
| |
| Core and builtins |
| ----------------- |
| |
| - A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed. |
| For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in |
| this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a' |
| iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce', |
| 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be', |
| 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error. |
| Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say |
| [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost. |
| |
| - getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as |
| documented, rather than returning the default value for all |
| exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for |
| example). |
| |
| - Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API. |
| A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved |
| proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a |
| built-in exception. |
| |
| - unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary |
| objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists. |
| unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still |
| require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument. |
| |
| - isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a |
| class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the |
| second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a |
| class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance() |
| will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the |
| things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g. |
| |
| isinstance(x, (A, B)) |
| |
| returns true if x is an instance of A or B. |
| |
| Extension modules |
| ----------------- |
| |
| - thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None). |
| |
| - binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp. |
| |
| - readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the |
| pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function. |
| |
| - os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where |
| available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions |
| now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be |
| accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for |
| backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence. |
| Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as |
| attributes. |
| |
| - time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a |
| pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with |
| attributes like tm_year etc. |
| |
| - Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional |
| second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount |
| of memory to use for the uncompressed data. |
| |
| - optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL |
| functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls |
| are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not |
| automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile |
| arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional. |
| |
| - posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now |
| exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW. |
| |
| Library |
| ------- |
| |
| - doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module |
| being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg. |
| |
| - HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has |
| been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling, |
| but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and |
| documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final). |
| |
| - profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception |
| raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used |
| to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive |
| functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function. |
| |
| The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile |
| profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if |
| you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile |
| intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more |
| than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended |
| to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and |
| that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but |
| without losing information). |
| |
| - Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver |
| a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can |
| now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or |
| instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code. |
| Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile |
| module). |
| |
| Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses. |
| Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of |
| profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details |
| and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed |
| a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines. |
| |
| - quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter, |
| which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q' |
| encoding. |
| |
| - The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after |
| finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.) |
| |
| - The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument |
| to allow saving the message body to a file. |
| |
| - The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which |
| only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body. |
| Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing |
| audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter). |
| |
| - ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB. |
| |
| - ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO, |
| ON, and OFF. |
| |
| - xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute |
| and item() method as required by the DOM specifications. |
| |
| Tools/Demos |
| ----------- |
| |
| - Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package |
| derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see |
| http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net. |
| |
| - The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have |
| been added: -X and -E. |
| |
| Build |
| ----- |
| |
| - configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and |
| the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler. |
| |
| C API |
| ----- |
| |
| - The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that |
| the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is |
| not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in |
| Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for |
| "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return. |
| |
| - PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments. |
| Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well |
| as long) arguments. |
| |
| - PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread |
| ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no |
| thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only |
| the thread module used this API). This code has only really been |
| tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and |
| report any bugs or strange behavior). |
| |
| - PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as |
| input. |
| |
| New platforms |
| ------------- |
| |
| Tests |
| ----- |
| |
| Windows |
| ------- |
| |
| - Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension |
| registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry |
| is created for .py and .pyw files. |
| |
| - The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven |
| Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK |
| action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via |
| signal.signal(). For example:: |
| |
| # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C |
| # (SIGINT) behavior. |
| import signal |
| signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler) |
| |
| try: |
| while 1: |
| pass |
| except KeyboardInterrupt: |
| # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed |
| # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the |
| # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup). |
| print "Clean exit" |
| |
| |
| What's New in Python 2.2a4? |
| =========================== |
| |
| *Release date: 28-Sep-2001* |
| |
| Type/class unification and new-style classes |
| -------------------------------------------- |
| |
| - pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes; |
| e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper |
| documentation for all operations on list objects. |
| |
| - Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely |
| be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with |
| Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass |
| examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work |
| with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write |
| webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug |
| report on SourceForge.) |
| |
| - property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc. |
| These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__' |
| in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't |
| discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to |
| associate a docstring with a property. |
| |
| - Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For |
| example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str |
| instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most |
| other built-in object types. |
| |
| - The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type |
| 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>, |
| *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type |
| 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or |
| otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects). |
| |
| - The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>; |
| previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>. |
| |
| - For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now |
| called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for |
| *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the |
| one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular |
| attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute |
| access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If |
| both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises |
| AttributeError, __getattr__ is called. |
| |
| - The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to. |
| The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old |
| class. |
| |
| - The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern, |
| "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin |
| constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function. |
| file() is now the preferred way to open a file. |
| |
| - Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to |
| the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential |
| and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so |
| now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments. |
| |
| - Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or |
| unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired. |
| |
| - Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an |
| immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode), |
| where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the |
| operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that |
| instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of |
| a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str |
| with the same value as s. |
| |
| - Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added. |
| |
| Core |
| ---- |
| |
| - file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings. |
| |
| - PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like |
| PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str |
| on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This |
| makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer |
| objects. |
| |
| - PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write |
| method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target |
| of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must |
| at least convert them into ASCII strings. |
| |
| - Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer |
| necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order |
| to let other runnable threads be scheduled. |
| |
| Library |
| ------- |
| |
| - StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support |
| read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods. |
| These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such |
| by the instances. |
| |
| - The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the |
| mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes |
| and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators. |
| |
| - difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This |
| restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output |
| before the entire comparison is complete. |
| |
| - StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support |
| iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is |
| called for each iteration until it returns an empty string). |
| |
| - The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access |
| builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(), |
| getwriter(). |
| |
| - SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer) |
| simplifies writing XML RPC servers. |
| |
| - os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname |
| after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this |
| is an alias for os.path.abspath(). |
| |
| - operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any |
| iterable object. |
| |
| - smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of |
| the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods. |
| |
| - hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message |
| authentication. |
| |
| - mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the |
| same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed. |
| |
| - The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of |
| Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a |
| Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as |
| a sample driver.) |
| |
| Build |
| ----- |
| |
| - Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports |
| it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at |
| least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large |
| files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is |
| still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your |
| kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose |
| kernel has large file support. |
| |
| - The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a |
| cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied |
| values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works |
| flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of |
| autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN). |
| |
| - The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser |
| generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when |
| using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py. |
| |
| C API |
| ----- |
| |
| - The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read |
| and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode. |
| |
| New platforms |
| ------------- |
| |
| - Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution |
| (http://familiar.handhelds.org). |
| |
| Tests |
| ----- |
| |
| - The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to |
| an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at |
| the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a |
| variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences. |
| This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting. |
| |
| - The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main() |
| convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being |
| imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and |
| flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework. |
| |
| - regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now, |
| especially in regard to reporting errors. |
| |
| Windows |
| ------- |
| |
| - Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems |
| that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in |
| Python 2.2a3" for more detail. |
| |
| |
| What's New in Python 2.2a3? |
| =========================== |
| |
| *Release Date: 07-Sep-2001* |
| |
| Core |
| ---- |
| |
| - Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too |
| big to represent as a C double. |
| |
| - The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument |
| if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of |
| integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case |
| the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same |
| restriction). |
| |
| - The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much |
| more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes |
| reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base |
| classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned |
| an empty list. In 2.2a3, |
| |
| >>> dir([]) |
| ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__', |
| '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__', |
| '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__', |
| '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__', |
| '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__', |
| 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove', |
| 'reverse', 'sort'] |
| |
| dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though. |
| |
| - Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather |
| than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP |
| 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for |
| this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old |
| OverflowError exception. |
| |
| - A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time |
| warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible |
| values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is |
| -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no |
| warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about |
| all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall |
| also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments |
| (for use with fixdiv.py). |
| [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became |
| obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] :: |
| |
| Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but |
| only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or |
| -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and |
| warns about classic division everywhere else. |
| |
| - Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int, |
| long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and |
| dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.) |
| Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in |
| types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading |
| __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances |
| will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value" |
| (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance |
| once it is created. |
| |
| - The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a |
| mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its |
| (key, value) pairs. |
| |
| - A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making |
| "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an |
| explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation |
| |
| - A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the |
| creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by |
| getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or |
| write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__. |
| See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property |
| |
| - The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been |
| liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now |
| legal that were SyntaxErrors before: |
| |
| 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008. |
| |
| - An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete |
| exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError. |
| |
| Library |
| ------- |
| |
| - telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for |
| setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing |
| of suboptions. |
| |
| - The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to |
| ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new |
| freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow- |
| checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all |
| platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable |
| in this area anymore). |
| |
| - Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class |
| threading.Timer. |
| |
| - math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge |
| long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0. |
| |
| - A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is |
| currently held. See the docs for the imp module. |
| |
| - pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read |
| dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes. |
| When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are |
| converted to Python longs. |
| |
| - In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling |
| code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole. |
| |
| - unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks |
| generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references |
| to objects that should be garbage collected between tests. |
| |
| Tools |
| ----- |
| |
| - Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix |
| division operators as per PEP 238. |
| |
| Build |
| ----- |
| |
| - If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at |
| Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac |
| application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa. |
| Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please. |
| |
| C API |
| ----- |
| |
| - New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj). |
| |
| - Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no |
| callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow |
| errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check:: |
| |
| double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object); |
| if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) { |
| /* The conversion failed. */ |
| } |
| |
| - The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still |
| compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension |
| module: |
| |
| - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC |
| |
| - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and |
| PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them |
| |
| - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini |
| to PyObject_GC_UnTrack |
| |
| - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations |
| |
| - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC |
| |
| - Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV(). |
| These can be used safely to construct string objects from a |
| sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported |
| by PyErr_Format()). |
| |
| New platforms |
| ------------- |
| |
| - Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile |
| under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran |
| out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError |
| when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and |
| causing later failures too. |
| |
| Tests |
| ----- |
| |
| Windows |
| ------- |
| |
| - Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on |
| Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek() |
| to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough |
| disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large |
| partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte) |
| filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there. |
| FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now. |
| NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be |
| used from Python now. |
| |
| - The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC |
| points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan). |
| |
| |
| What's New in Python 2.2a2? |
| =========================== |
| |
| *Release Date: 22-Aug-2001* |
| |
| Build |
| ----- |
| |
| - Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1, |
| generously donated to us by Wise Solutions. |
| |
| - configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values |
| ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode |
| type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter. |
| |
| - A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework, |
| which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting |
| point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org |
| if you are interested in helping. |
| |
| - The NeXT platform is no longer supported. |
| |
| - The 'new' module is now statically linked. |
| |
| Tools |
| ----- |
| |
| - The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically |
| edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See |
| the module docstring for details. |
| |
| Tests |
| ----- |
| |
| - regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some |
| platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest |
| also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests |
| which require network access or consume significant disk resources. |
| |
| - Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to |
| Nick Mathewson. |
| |
| Core |
| ---- |
| |
| - The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP |
| 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until |
| Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in |
| which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator |
| module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented |
| assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable |
| methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion: |
| <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html> |
| |
| - Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells |
| (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael |
| Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full |
| details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>. |
| |
| - The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the |
| trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of |
| some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing |
| bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to |
| come a long way). |
| |
| - Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import |
| now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to |
| write filters for these warnings). |
| |
| - A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a |
| dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None, |
| but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it |
| to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes |
| have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None. |
| |
| - A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of |
| all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically |
| significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with |
| "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if |
| the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an |
| older distribution. |
| |
| Library |
| ------- |
| |
| - New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py. |
| These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py, |
| for programmatic reuse. |
| |
| - New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute |
| value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more |
| reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values. |
| |
| - Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added. |
| |
| - Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings. |
| |
| - Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore() |
| |
| - Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module. |
| |
| - The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags. |
| |
| - The gc module offers the get_referents function. |
| |
| New platforms |
| ------------- |
| |
| C API |
| ----- |
| |
| - Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added |
| which provide a cross-platform implementations for the |
| relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to |
| the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions |
| apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection |
| against buffer overruns. |
| |
| - Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters |
| and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to |
| impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension |
| will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make |
| sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by |
| using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension. |
| |
| - Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition |
| tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a |
| single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than |
| calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now |
| deprecated. |
| |
| Windows |
| ------- |
| |
| - "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else |
| relevant is found. |
| |
| |
| What's New in Python 2.2a1? |
| =========================== |
| |
| *Release date: 18-Jul-2001* |
| |
| Core |
| ---- |
| |
| - TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's |
| described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP |
| 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released |
| with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately |
| through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this |
| with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is |
| possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release |
| this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards |
| incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be |
| repaired. |
| |
| - Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see |
| below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or |
| more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new |
| keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a |
| future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236). |
| Generators will become a standard feature in a future release |
| (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an |
| ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used. |
| (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of |
| PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.) |
| |
| - The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now |
| only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then |
| only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a |
| leading BMO character). |
| |
| - Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already |
| existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access |
| to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs. |
| |
| To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special |
| casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects |
| were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding). |
| |
| Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the |
| requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will |
| return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1") |
| will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs |
| for various simple to use conversions. |
| |
| New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode() |
| and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects): |
| |
| +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+ |
| |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description | |
| +=========+===========+===========+=============================+ |
| |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) | |
| +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+ |
| |base64 | string | string | base64 codec | |
| +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+ |
| |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec | |
| +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+ |
| |zlib | string | string | zlib compression | |
| +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+ |
| |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec | |
| +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+ |
| |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec| |
| +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+ |
| |
| - Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode |
| encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs' |
| as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium |
| term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than |
| 'mbcs'. |
| |
| On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for |
| functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python |
| string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for |
| the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's |
| default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing |
| it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python |
| would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than |
| the default encoding for the file system. |
| |
| In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with |
| Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect, |
| increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context. |
| See [????] for more details, including examples. |
| |
| - Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full |
| precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a |
| .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the |
| 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754 |
| floating arithmetic, |
| |
| x = 9007199254740992.0 |
| print long(x) |
| |
| printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000 |
| if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using |
| str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal |
| now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full |
| machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion |
| functions are of good quality). |
| |
| This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and |
| usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable |
| algorithms to break. |
| |
| - The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed |
| benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(), |
| dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a |
| given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should |
| rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the |
| order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a |
| dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new |
| sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted |
| order. |
| |
| - Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster |
| operation along the most common code paths. |
| |
| - Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means |
| the same as dict.has_key(x). |
| |
| - The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping |
| objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys() |
| and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example, |
| {}.update(UserDict()) |
| |
| - Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values |
| to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter() |
| to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value |
| from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the |
| tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators |
| using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C). |
| Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys. |
| Iterating over a file generates its lines. |
| |
| - The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator |
| arguments:: |
| |
| map(), filter(), reduce(), zip() |
| list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API) |
| max(), min() |
| join() method of strings |
| extend() method of lists |
| 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API) |
| operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API) |
| right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as :: |
| x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values |
| |
| - Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example, |
| random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute). |
| |
| - Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even |
| if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==. |
| |
| - Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were |
| insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python |
| to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or |
| values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down. |
| |
| - Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help |
| dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict |
| d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x |
| faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and |
| the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never). |
| |
| - repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple). |
| |
| |
| Library |
| ------- |
| |
| - The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase |
| were added to the string module. These a locale-independent |
| constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now |
| use in appropriate locations in the standard library. |
| |
| - The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using |
| sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags. |
| |
| - Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This |
| provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition, |
| Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based, |
| one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation. |
| |
| - The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing, |
| repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist() |
| method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260. |
| |
| - A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added. |
| |
| - calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale. |
| |
| - strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6), |
| and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items |
| that are still imported into string.py). |
| |
| - Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings. |
| |
| - pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects. |
| Now it does. |
| |
| - pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict). |
| |
| - New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C |
| types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In |
| native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports |
| these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config |
| process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types. |
| In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are |
| 8-byte integral types. |
| |
| - The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes |
| pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help', |
| it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or |
| 'help(object)'. |
| |
| Tests |
| ----- |
| |
| - New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value |
| comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This |
| rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint |
| of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!). |
| |
| - New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and |
| pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple |
| cases produce correct output. |
| |
| C API |
| ----- |
| |
| - Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal |
| _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating. |
| |
| ---- |
| |
| **(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)** |