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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +000015- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
16 new documentation and modified profiler and bdb modules for more details
17
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +000018- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
19
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +000020- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
21
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +000022- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
23 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
24
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +000025- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
26 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
27 Fixes bug #858016 .
28
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +000029- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
30 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
31 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
32
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +000033- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
34 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
35 improves their performance (about 35%).
36
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +000037- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
38 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
39 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
40
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +000041- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
42 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
43 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
44 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
45
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000046- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
47 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
48 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
49 length is not known).
50
51- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
52 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +000053 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
54 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000055 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
56
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +000057- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
58 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
59
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +000060- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
61 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
62 keyword arguments.
63
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +000064- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
65 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
66 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
67
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +000068- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
69 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
70 cases.
71
72- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
73 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
74 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
75 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
76 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
77 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
78 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
79 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
80 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
81 a release build.
82
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +000083- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
84 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
85
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000086- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +000087 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000088
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +000089- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
90 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
91 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
92 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
93 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
94 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
95 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
96 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
97 destroyed.
98
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +000099- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
100 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
101 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
102 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
103 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
104 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
105 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
106 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
107
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000108- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
109 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
110 character other than a space.
111
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000112- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
113 by the function object or by the method object, the function
114 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
115 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
116 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
117 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
118 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
119 attributes with the same name.
120
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000121- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
122 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
123 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
124 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
125 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
126 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
127 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
128 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
129 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
130 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
131 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
132 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
133 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
134 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000135
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000136- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
137 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
138 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
139 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
140 This has been repaired.
141
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000142- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
143
144- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
145
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000146- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
147 over a sequence.
148
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000149- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
150 from any iterable.
151
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000152- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
153
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000154- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
155 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
156 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
157 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
158 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
159 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
160 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
161 records with equal keys is unchanged).
162
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000163- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
164 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
165 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
166
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000167- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
168 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
169 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
170 freelist.
171
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000172- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
173 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
174
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000175- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
176 number.
177
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000178- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
179 a TypeError exception.
180
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000181- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
182 820195.
183
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000184- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
185 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
186 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
187
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000188- str and unicode builtin types now have rsplit() method that is
189 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
190 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000191
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000192- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
193 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
194 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
195
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000196- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
197 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
198 method is called as necessary.
199
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000200- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
201 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
202 the first call.
203
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000204
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000205Extension modules
206-----------------
207
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000208- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
209 fewer false positives.
210
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000211- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
212 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
213
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000214- Bug #920575: A problem that _locale module segfaults on
215 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
216
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000217- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
218 scheme has been updated the same as for list objects. The improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000219 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
220 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
221 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000222
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000223- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
224 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
225 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
226 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
227
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000228- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
229 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
230 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
231 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
232 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
233 #897625.
234
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000235- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
236 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
237
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000238- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
239 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
240 and pops on either side of the deque.
241
242- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
243 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
244
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000245- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
246 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
247 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
248 other functions that expect a function argument.
249
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000250- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
251
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000252- os.getsid was added.
253
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000254- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
255 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
256 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
257
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000258- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
259
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000260- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
261
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000262- readline.clear_history was added.
263
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000264- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
265
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000266- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
267
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000268- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
269
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000270- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
271
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000272- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
273
274- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
275
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000276- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
277
278- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
279
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000280- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
281 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
282 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
283
284- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
285 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
286 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
287 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
288 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
289 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
290 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
291
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000292- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
293 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
294 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
295 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000296
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000297- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
298 iterators from a single iterable.
299
300- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
301 of raising a TypeError exception.
302
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000303- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
304 as parameter.
305
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000306Library
307-------
308
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000309- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
310 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
311 type pattern with the same value exists.
312
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000313- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
314 when run from the command prompt).
315
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000316- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
317 not taken into consideration when caching value.
318
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000319- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
320 default sort).
321
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000322- Added global runctx function to profile module
323
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000324- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
325
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000326- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
327
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000328- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
329
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000330- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
331 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
332 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
333 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
334 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
335 accordingly.
336
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000337- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
338 decoding standards.
339
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000340- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
341 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
342 called for all requests.
343
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000344- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
345 they are passed to the compiler.
346
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000347- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
348 indent, width and depth.
349
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000350- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
351 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
352
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000353- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
354 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
355
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000356- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
357
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000358- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
359
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000360- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
361
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000362- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
363 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
364
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000365- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
366 for better performance
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000367
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000368- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
369 a string).
370
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000371- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
372
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000373- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
374
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000375- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
376
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000377- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
378
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000379- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
380 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
381 list of fieldnames.
382
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000383- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
384 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
385
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000386- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
387
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000388- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
389 empty lists.
390
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000391- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
392 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
393 and shelves.
394
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000395- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
396 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
397
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000398- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000399 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
400 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000401
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000402- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
403 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000404 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000405
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000406- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000407 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
408 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
409
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000410- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
411 and removed in Py2.4.
412
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000413- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
414
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000415- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
416
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000417Tools/Demos
418-----------
419
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000420- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
421 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
422
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000423- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
424
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000425- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
426 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
427 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
428 destination in situations where both files are given.
429
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000430- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
431 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
432 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
433 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
434
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000435- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
436
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000437- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
438 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
439 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
440 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
441 now.
442
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000443- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
444 in effect
445
446- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
447 C-c C-h
448
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000449- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
450 -d option was given.
451
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000452Build
453-----
454
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000455- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
456 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
457
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000458- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
459 removed.
460
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000461- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
462 supported (see PEP 11).
463
464- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
465
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000466- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
467
468- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
469 (see PEP 11).
470
471- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
472 sizeof(char) must be 1.
473
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000474C API
475-----
476
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000477- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
478 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000479 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
480 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000481
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000482- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
483 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
484
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000485- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
486 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
487 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
488 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
489 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
490
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000491- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
492 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
493 about 10% faster.
494
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000495- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
496 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
497
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000498- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
499 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
500 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
501 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
502
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000503New platforms
504-------------
505
506Tests
507-----
508
509Windows
510-------
511
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000512- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
513 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
514 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
515 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
516
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000517- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
518 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
519 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
520
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000521Mac
522----
523
524
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000525What's New in Python 2.3 final?
526===============================
527
528*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
529
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000530IDLE
531----
532
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000533- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
534 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
535 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
536 context-menu actions.
537
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000538- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
539 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
540 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
541 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
542 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
543 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
544 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
545 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
546 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
547
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000548
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000549What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
550=============================================
551
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000552*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000553
554Core and builtins
555-----------------
556
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000557- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000558 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000559 comment at the end are still unsupported.
560
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000561Extension modules
562-----------------
563
564- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
565 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
566 than once. This has been fixed.
567
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000568- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
569 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
570 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
571 call.
572
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000573- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
574
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000575Library
576-------
577
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000578- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
579 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
580
581- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
582 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
583 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
584 restored.
585
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000586IDLE
587----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000588
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000589- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000590
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000591Build
592-----
593
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000594- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
595 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
596
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000597C API
598-----
599
600Windows
601-------
602
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000603- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
604 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
605
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000606- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
607
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000608Mac
609---
610
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000611- Various fixes to pimp.
612
613- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
614
615- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
616 more problems than it solves.
617
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000618
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000619What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
620=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000621
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000622*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
623
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000624Core and builtins
625-----------------
626
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000627- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
628 by sys.setcheckinterval().
629
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000630- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
631 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000632 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000633
634- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
635 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
636 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000637 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000638
639- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
640 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000641
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000642- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
643 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
644 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
645
646- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000647 770247.
648
649- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000650
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000651Extension modules
652-----------------
653
654- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
655 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
656
657- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
658
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000659- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
660
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000661- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
662 contained within the _strptime module.
663
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000664- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
665 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
666
667- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000668 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
669
670- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
671 the find_class attribute, if present.
672
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000673- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000674
675 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
676 (SF bug 763298).
677
678 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000679 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
680 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
681 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000682
683 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
684
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000685Library
686-------
687
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000688- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
689
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000690- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
691 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
692 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
693 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
694 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
695 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
696 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
697 or Tester().
698
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000699- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
700 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
701 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
702 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
703 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
704 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
705 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
706 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
707 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000708
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000709 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000710
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000711- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
712 weren't before was an oversight.
713
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000714- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
715 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
716
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000717- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
718 when there are no lines.
719
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000720- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
721 which could occur with Tk 8.4
722
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000723- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
724 to child processes.
725
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000726- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
727
728- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
729
730- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
731 xmlrpclib.
732
733- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
734 responses.
735
736- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
737 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
738
739- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
740 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
741 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
742
743- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
744 used as patterns.
745
746- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
747 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
748 than Tk 8.3.
749
750- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
751
752- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000753
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000754Tools/Demos
755-----------
756
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000757- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
758
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000759- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
760
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000761- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000762
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000763Build
764-----
765
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000766- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
767
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000768- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
769
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000770- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
771 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000772
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000773- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
774 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
775 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000776
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000777C API
778-----
779
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000780- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
781 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
782
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000783Windows
784-------
785
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000786- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
787 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
788 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
789 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
790 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
791 Python exception ::
792
793 thread.error: can't start new thread
794
795 is raised now.
796
797- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
798 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
799 instead of from DLL teardown.
800
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000801Mac
802---
803
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000804- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000805 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000806 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
807 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
808 the executable in the bundle.
809
810- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000811
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000812- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
813
814- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
815 on Panther.
816
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000817What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
818================================
819
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000820*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000821
822Core and builtins
823-----------------
824
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000825- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
826 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
827 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
828 with the -i option.
829
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000830- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
831 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
832
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000833- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
834 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
835
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000836- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
837 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
838 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
839 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
840 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
841 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
842 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
843 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
844 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
845 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
846 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
847 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
848 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000849
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000850- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
851 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
852 embedded in a lambda expression.
853
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000854- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
855 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
856 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
857 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
858 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
859
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000860- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
861 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
862 matches the restriction on classic classes.
863
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000864- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
865 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
866
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000867- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
868 It's writable again.
869
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000870- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
871 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
872 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000873 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000874
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000875- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
876 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
877 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
878
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000879Extension modules
880-----------------
881
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000882- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
883 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
884
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000885- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
886 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
887 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
888 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
889
890- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
891 collection.
892
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000893- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
894 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
895 unique within a single program run.
896
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000897- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
898 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
899
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000900- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
901 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
902
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000903- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
904 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000905
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000906- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
907
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000908- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
909 Fixes SF bug #730685.
910
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000911- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
912 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
913 for many BSD-derived systems.
914
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000915
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000916Library
917-------
918
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000919- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
920 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
921 primary ones:
922
923 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
924 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
925 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
926
927 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
928 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
929 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
930 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
931 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
932 framework features (which doctest lacks).
933
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000934- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
935 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
936 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
937 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
938 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
939 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
940 argument.
941
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000942- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
943 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
944 in the archive.
945
946- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
947 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
948
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000949- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
950 569574).
951
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000952- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
953 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
954 no more.
955
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000956- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
957 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
958 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
959 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
960 code coverage.
961
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000962- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
963 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
964 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000965 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
966 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000967
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000968- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
969 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
970 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000971 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000972
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000973- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
974
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000975- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
976 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
977 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
978 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
979
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000980- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
981 handling.
982
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000983- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
984 __doc__ of data descriptors.
985
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000986- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
987 in socket.py.
988
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000989- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
990
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000991- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
992 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
993 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
994 opener with proxy support.
995
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000996- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
997
998- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
999
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001000Tools/Demos
1001-----------
1002
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001003- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1004
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001005- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1006
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001007- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1008 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001009
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001010- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1011 files.
1012
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001013Build
1014-----
1015
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001016- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001017 different root directory.
1018
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001019C API
1020-----
1021
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001022- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1023 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1024 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1025 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1026 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1027 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1028 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1029 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1030 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1031 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1032
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001033- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1034 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1035 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1036 from Python.
1037
1038
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001039New platforms
1040-------------
1041
1042None this time.
1043
1044Tests
1045-----
1046
1047- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1048 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1049
1050Windows
1051-------
1052
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001053- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1054
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001055- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1056 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1057 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1058 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1059 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1060 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1061 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1062 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1063 that's what it's for.
1064
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001065Mac
1066---
1067
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001068- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1069 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1070 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1071 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001072- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1073 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1074- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001075
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001076SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1077------------------------------------
1078
1079430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1080598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1081622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1082661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1083683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1084697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1085713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1086724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1087727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1088729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1089730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1090731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1091732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1092733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1093735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1094740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1095744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1096745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1097747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1098749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1099751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1100753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1101755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1102757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1103760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1104
1105
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001106What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1107================================
1108
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001109*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001110
1111Core and builtins
1112-----------------
1113
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001114- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1115 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1116
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001117- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1118 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1119 and cannot be strings).
1120
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001121- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1122 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1123 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1124 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1125
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001126- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1127 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1128 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1129 Python itself.
1130
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001131- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1132 the referenced object, if it has one.
1133
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001134- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1135 the thread started at
1136 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1137
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001138- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1139 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1140 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1141 placed on a list index.
1142
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001143- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1144 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1145 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1146 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1147
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001148- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1149 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1150 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1151 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1152 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1153 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1154 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1155
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001156- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1157 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1158 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1159 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1160 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1161
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001162- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1163 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001164
1165- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1166 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1167 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1168 #693195.)
1169
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001170- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1171 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001172
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001173- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001174 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001175 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1176 interpreter executions, would fail.
1177
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001178- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001179 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001180 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001181
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001182Extension modules
1183-----------------
1184
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001185- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1186 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1187 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1188 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1189
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001190- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1191 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1192
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001193- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1194 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1195 and Greg Chapman.)
1196
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001197- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1198 recursively.
1199
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001200- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001201 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1202 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1203 leaks.
1204
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001205- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1206
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001207- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1208 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1209 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1210 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1211 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1212 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1213 #705836.
1214
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001215- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001216 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1217
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001218- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1219 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1220 See SF bug #692416.
1221
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001222- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1223 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1224
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001225- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1226 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1227 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001228
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001229- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001230 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1231 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1232
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001233- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1234 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1235 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1236 timeouts to work properly.
1237
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001238Library
1239-------
1240
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001241- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1242 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1243 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1244 future release.
1245
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001246- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1247 for querying platform dependent features.
1248
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001249- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001250
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001251- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1252 pickle protocol versions.
1253
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001254- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1255 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1256 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1257
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001258- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1259
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001260- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1261 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1262 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1263 modules.
1264
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001265- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1266 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1267 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1268
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001269- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1270 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1271
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001272- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1273 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1274 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1275
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001276- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001277 MS Office extensions.
1278
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001279- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1280 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1281
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001282- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1283 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1284
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001285- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1286 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1287 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1288 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1289 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1290 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1291
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001292- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1293 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1294 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001295
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001296- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1297 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1298 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1299
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001300- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1301
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001302- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1303 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1304 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1305
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001306Tools/Demos
1307-----------
1308
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001309- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1310 See the module docstring for details.
1311
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001312Build
1313-----
1314
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001315- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1316 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001317
1318C API
1319-----
1320
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001321- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1322
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001323- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1324 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1325 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1326
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001327- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1328 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001329
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001330 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1331 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1332 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001333
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001334- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001335 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1336
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001337- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1338 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1339 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001340
1341New platforms
1342-------------
1343
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001344None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001345
1346Tests
1347-----
1348
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001349- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1350 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001351
1352Windows
1353-------
1354
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001355- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1356 function.
1357
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001358- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1359 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001360
1361Mac
1362---
1363
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001364- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1365 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001366
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001367- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1368 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001369
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001370- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1371 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1372 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001373
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001374- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001375 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1376 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001377
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001378- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1379 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001380
1381
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001382What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1383=================================
1384
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001385*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001386
1387Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001388-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001389
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001390- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1391 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1392 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1393
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001394- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1395 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1396 (SF patch #664376.)
1397
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001398- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1399 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1400 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1401 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1402 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1403 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001404 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001405
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001406- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1407 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1408 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1409 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001410 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001411
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001412- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1413 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1414 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1415 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1416 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1417 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1418 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1419 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1420 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1421 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1422 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1423
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001424- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1425 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1426 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1427 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1428 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1429 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1430
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001431- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1432 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1433
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001434- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1435 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1436 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1437 case.)
1438
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001439- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1440 passed as unicode strings.
1441
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001442- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1443 See SF bug #683467.
1444
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001445- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1446 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1447
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001448- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1449
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001450- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1451
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001452- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1453 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1454 arguments.
1455
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001456- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1457 See SF bug #667147.
1458
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001459- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001460 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001461 See SF bug #676155.
1462
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001463- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001464 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001465 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1466 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1467 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1468 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1469 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1470 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001471
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001472Extension modules
1473-----------------
1474
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001475- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1476 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1477 tp_as_number pointer.
1478
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001479- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1480 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1481 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1482 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1483 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1484
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001485- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1486
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001487- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1488
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001489- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001490 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001491 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1492 patch #678531.)
1493
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001494- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1495 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1496
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001497- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1498 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1499
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001500- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1501
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001502- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1503 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1504 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1505
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001506- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1507
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001508- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1509 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1510
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001511- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001512
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001513- datetime changes:
1514
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001515 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1516
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001517 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1518 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1519 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1520 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1521 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1522 now.
1523
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001524 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001525 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1526 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001527
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001528 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001529 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001530 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1531 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1532 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1533 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001534
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001535 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1536 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1537 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001538 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1539
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001540 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1541 by a later example coded by Guido.
1542
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001543 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001544 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1545 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1546 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001547 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1548 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1549
1550 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1551 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1552 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1553 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1554 tzinfo subclass instance.
1555
1556 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1557 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1558 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1559 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1560 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1561 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1562 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1563 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001564
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001565 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1566 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1567 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1568 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1569 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001570 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1571
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001572 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001573
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001574 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1575 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1576 as a naive datetime object.
1577
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001578 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1579 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1580 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1581
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001582 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1583 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1584 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1585 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1586 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1587 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1588 comparison.
1589
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001590 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1591 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1592 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1593 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001594 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001595
1596 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001597
1598 and ::
1599
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001600 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1601
1602 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1603 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1604 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1605 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1606
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001607 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1608 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1609 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1610 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1611 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1612
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001613 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1614 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001615 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1616 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001617
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001618Library
1619-------
1620
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001621- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1622 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1623
1624- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1625 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1626 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1627 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1628 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1629 See PEP 307 for details.
1630
1631- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1632 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1633
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001634- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1635 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001636 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001637 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1638 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001639 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001640
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001641- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1642 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1643
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001644- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1645 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1646 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1647
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001648- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1649
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001650- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1651 exception.
1652
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001653- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1654 class.
1655
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001656- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1657 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1658 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1659
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001660- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1661 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1662
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001663- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001664 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1665 See SF bug #659228.
1666
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001667- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1668 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1669 See SF patch #651082.
1670
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001671- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001672
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001673- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1674 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1675
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001676- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001677 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001678
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001679- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1680 DOS paths from other platforms.
1681
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001682Tools/Demos
1683-----------
1684
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001685- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1686 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1687 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1688 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1689 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1690 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1691 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1692 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1693 example:
1694
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001695 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1696 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001697
1698 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1699
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001700
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001701Build
1702-----
1703
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001704- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1705 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1706 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001707 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1708
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001709 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1710
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001711- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1712 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1713 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1714 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1715 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1716 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1717 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1718 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1719 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1720
1721- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1722 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1723 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1724 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1725
1726- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1727 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1728
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001729C API
1730-----
1731
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001732- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1733 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001734
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001735- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1736 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1737 tp_as_number pointer.
1738
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001739- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1740 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1741 (SF #681367)
1742
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001743- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1744 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1745 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1746 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001747
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001748Tests
1749-----
1750
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001751- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001752 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1753 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1754 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1755 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1756 pydoc.)
1757
1758- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1759
1760- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001761
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001762Windows
1763-------
1764
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001765- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1766 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1767 time).
1768
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001769- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1770 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1771
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001772- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1773 release without strong cryptography.
1774
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001775- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001776 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001777
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001778- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1779 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1780
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001781Mac
1782---
1783
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001784- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1785 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001786
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001787- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1788 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1789 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001790
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001791- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1792 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001793
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001794- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1795 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1796 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1797 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001798
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001799- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001800 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1801 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1802 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001803
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001804
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001805What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001806=================================
1807
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001808*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001809
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001810Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001811--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001812
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001813- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1814
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001815- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1816 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001817 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001818 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001819 a different meaning than before.
1820
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001821- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001822 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001823 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001824
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001825- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001826 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001827 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001828
1829- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1830 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1831 and deallocation.
1832
1833- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1834 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1835
1836- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1837 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1838 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1839 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1840 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1841
1842- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1843 now detected by the garbage collector.
1844
1845- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1846 [SF bug 519621]
1847
1848- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1849 identifier.
1850
1851- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1852 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1853 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1854 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1855 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1856 [SF bug 563060]
1857
1858- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1859 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1860 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1861 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1862 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1863
1864- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1865 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1866 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1867
1868- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1869
1870- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1871 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1872 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1873 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1874 state of the slots would be lost.)
1875
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001876Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001877-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001878
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001879- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001880 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1881 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1882 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1883 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001884 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1885 Jython 2.1.
1886
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001887- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001888 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001889 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1890 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1891 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1892 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1893 these, see PEP 302.
1894
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001895- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1896 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1897 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1898
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001899- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1900 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1901 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1902
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001903- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1904 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1905 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1906
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001907- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1908 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1909 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1910 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1911 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1912 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1913 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1914 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1915 releases or implementations.
1916
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001917- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001918 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1919 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001920
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001921- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1922 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1923
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001924- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1925 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1926 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1927
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001928- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1929 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1930
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001931- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1932 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001933 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1934 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001935
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001936- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1937 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1938 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1939 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1940 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1941
1942 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1943 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1944 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1945 pattern.
1946
1947 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1948 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1949 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1950 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1951
1952 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1953 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1954 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1955 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1956 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1957 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1958
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001959- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1960 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1961 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1962 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1963 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1964 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1965 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1966 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001967
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001968- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1969 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1970 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1971 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1972 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001973 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1974 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1975 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1976 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1977 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1978 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1979 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001980
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001981- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1982 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1983
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001984- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1985 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1986 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1987 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1988 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1989 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1990 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1991 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1992 to Zack Weinberg!
1993
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001994- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1995 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1996 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1997 type. This has been fixed now.
1998
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001999- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2000 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2001 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2002
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002003- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2004 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2005 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2006 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2007 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2008 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2009 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2010 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002011 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002012
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002013- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2014 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2015 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002016
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002017- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2018 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2019 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2020 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2021 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2022 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2023 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2024 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002025 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002026 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2027 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2028
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002029- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2030 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2031 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2032 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2033 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2034 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2035 this.)
2036
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002037- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2038 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002039 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002040 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002041 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2042 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002043 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2044 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002045
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002046- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2047 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2048 currently running.
2049
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002050- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2051 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2052 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2053 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2054
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002055- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2056 as directory names.
2057
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002058- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2059 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2060
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002061- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2062 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2063
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002064- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002065 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2066 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002067
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002068- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2069 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2070 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2071 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2072 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2073
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002074- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2075 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2076 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2077 removed.
2078
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002079- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2080 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2081 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2082
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002083- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2084 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2085 to __debug__.
2086
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002087- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2088 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2089 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2090
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002091- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2092 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2093 deprecated now.
2094
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002095- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2096 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2097 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002098
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002099- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2100 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2101 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2102 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2103 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002104
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002105- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2106 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2107
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002108- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2109 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2110 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002111 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002112 is backward compatible.
2113
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002114- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2115 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2116 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2117 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2118 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2119
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002120- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2121 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2122 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2123 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2124 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2125 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002126
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002127- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2128 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2129
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002130- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2131 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2132
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002133- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2134 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2135 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2136 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2137 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2138
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002139- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2140 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2141 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2142
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002143- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002144 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2145
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002146- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2147 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2148 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002149
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002150- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2151 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2152
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002153- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2154 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2155 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2156
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002157- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2158
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002159Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002160-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002161
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002162- Added three operators to the operator module:
2163 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2164 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2165 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2166
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002167- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2168
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002169- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2170 archives.
2171
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002172- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2173 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2174 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2175
2176 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2177
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002178- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2179 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2180 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002181 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002182
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002183- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2184 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2185 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2186 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002187 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2188 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2189 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2190 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002191
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002192- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2193 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002194
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002195- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2196
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002197- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2198 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2199
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002200- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2201 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2202 supported.
2203
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002204- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2205
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002206- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2207 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002208
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002209- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2210 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2211
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002212- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2213
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002214- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2215 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2216
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002217- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2218 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2219 functions but callable type objects.
2220
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002221- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002222 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002223 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002224
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002225- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2226 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002227
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002228- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2229 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002230
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002231- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2232 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2233 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2234 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2235
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002236- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2237 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002238
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002239- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2240 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2241 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2242 and __imul__.
2243
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002244- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002245 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2246 is called.
2247
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002248- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2249 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2250 interpreter was compiled.
2251
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002252- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2253 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2254 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002255 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002256 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2257 1, not 2.
2258
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002259- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2260 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2261 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2262 limit.
2263
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002264- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2265 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2266 bug #623464.
2267
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002268- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2269 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2270 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2271 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2272
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002273Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002274-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002275
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002276- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2277
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002278- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2279 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2280 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2281 with Python 2.3a2.
2282
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002283- os.path exposes getctime.
2284
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002285- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002286 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002287 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002288 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002289 unit tests of floating point results.
2290
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002291- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2292 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2293 has been increased.
2294
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002295- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2296 executed.
2297
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002298- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2299 postinstallation script.
2300
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002301- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2302 test the current module.
2303
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002304- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002305 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2306 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2307 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2308 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2309
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002310- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002311 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002312 Ward's Optik package.
2313
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002314- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2315 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2316 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2317 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2318
2319- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2320 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002321 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002322
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002323- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2324 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2325 shelf are binary pickles.
2326
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002327- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2328 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2329
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002330- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2331 modules are iterators now.
2332
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002333- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2334 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2335 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2336 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2337 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2338 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002339
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002340- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2341 with their entity value.
2342
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002343- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2344
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002345- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2346 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002347
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002348- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2349 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002350 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002351
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002352- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2353 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2354 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2355 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2356 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2357 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2358 main():
2359
2360 import locale
2361 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2362
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002363- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2364 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2365
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002366- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2367 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2368 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2369 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2370 to the new standard.
2371
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002372- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2373 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2374 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2375 an extension to the database.
2376
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002377- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2378 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2379 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2380 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002381 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002382
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002383- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002384 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002385
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002386- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2387 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2388 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2389 bounded integers.
2390
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002391- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2392 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2393 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2394 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2395 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2396 in existence.
2397
2398 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2399 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2400 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2401 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2402 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2403 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2404
2405 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2406 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2407 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2408 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2409
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002410- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2411 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2412 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2413
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002414- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2415
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002416- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2417 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2418 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2419 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2420
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002421- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2422 argument.
2423
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002424- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2425 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2426 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2427 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2428 [SF patch 560794].
2429
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002430- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2431 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2432 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002433 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2434 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2435 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002436
2437- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2438 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002439
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002440- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2441 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2442 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2443 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002444
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002445- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2446 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2447 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2448 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2449 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2450
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002451- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002452
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002453- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2454
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002455- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2456 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2457 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2458 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2459 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2460 identical to None.
2461
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002462- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2463 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2464 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2465 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2466 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2467 results now.
2468
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002469- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2470 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2471
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002472- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2473 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2474 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2475 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2476 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2477 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2478 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2479 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2480
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002481- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2482
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002483- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2484 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2485
2486- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2487 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2488 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2489 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2490 and other systems.
2491
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002492- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2493 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2494 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2495 UTF-16 is a 2-byte encoding and the C lib's line reading APIs don't
Marc-André Lemburg4179a012002-04-05 12:15:05 +00002496 work well with these.
2497
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002498- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2499
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002500- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002501 connections.
2502
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002503- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2504 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2505 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2506
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002507- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2508 sets
2509
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002510- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2511 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2512 name.
2513
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002514- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2515 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2516 passed in.
2517
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002518- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002519 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002520 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2521 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002522
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002523- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2524
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002525- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2526
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002527- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2528 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2529 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2530
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002531- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2532 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2533 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2534 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002535 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002536
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002537- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002538 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002539 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002540
2541- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2542 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2543 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2544
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002545- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002546 the value of its expression argument.
2547
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002548- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2549 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2550 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2551
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002552- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2553 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2554 skipstone browser was included.
2555
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002556- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2557 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2558
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002559Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002560-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002561
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002562- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2563 names in addition to accepting file names.
2564
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002565- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2566 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2567 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2568 still used and useful.)
2569
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002570- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2571 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2572 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2573 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002574
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002575- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2576 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2577 the generated binary.
2578
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002579Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002580-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002581
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002582- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2583
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002584- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2585 except in the hands of experts.
2586
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002587- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002588 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2589 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2590 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002591
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002592- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2593 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2594 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2595 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2596 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2597 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2598 builds.
2599
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002600- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2601 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2602 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2603 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2604 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2605 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2606 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2607 new type.
2608
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002609- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002610
2611 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2612 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2613 positive infinities.
2614
2615 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2616 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2617 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2618 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2619 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2620 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2621 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2622
2623 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2624
2625 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2626
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002627- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2628 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2629 size of the executable.
2630
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002631- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2632 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2633 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2634 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002635
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002636- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2637
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002638- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2639 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2640 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002641
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002642- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2643 well as Unix.
2644
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002645- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2646 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2647 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2648 modules in the README file for details.
2649
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002650C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002651-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002652
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002653- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2654 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002655 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002656 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002657 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002658
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002659- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2660 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2661 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2662 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2663 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2664 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002665 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002666 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2667 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2668 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2669 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2670 aligned.)
2671
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002672- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2673 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2674 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2675
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002676- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2677 level.
2678
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002679- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2680 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2681 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2682 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2683 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2684
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002685- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2686 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2687 code.
2688
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002689- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2690 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2691 adjusting for negative indices.
2692
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002693- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2694 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2695 object.
2696
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002697- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2698 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2699 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2700
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002701- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2702 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002703
2704- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2705
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002706- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2707 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2708 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2709 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2710
2711- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2712
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002713- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002714
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002715- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002716 without going through the buffer API.
2717
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002718- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002719
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002720- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2721 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2722 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2723 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2724
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002725- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2726 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2727
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002728- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002729 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2730
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002731New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002732-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002733
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002734- OpenVMS is now supported.
2735
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002736- AtheOS is now supported.
2737
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002738- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2739
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002740- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2741
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002742Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002743-----
2744
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002745- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2746 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2747 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002748
2749Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002750-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002751
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002752- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2753 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2754 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2755 bugs.
2756 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002757 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002758 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2759 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002760 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002761
2762- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002763 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002764
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002765- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2766 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2767
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002768- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2769 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002770 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002771 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2772
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002773- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2774 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2775 use files" uninstall option).
2776
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002777- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2778
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002779- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2780 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2781
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002782- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2783 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2784 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2785
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002786- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2787 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2788 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2789 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2790 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002791 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2792 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2793 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002794
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002795- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002796 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002797 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2798 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2799 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2800 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2801 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2802 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2803 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2804 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2805 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2806 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2807 work around.
2808
2809- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2810 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2811 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2812 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2813 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2814 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2815 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2816 specified with O_CREAT too).
2817
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002818Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002819----
2820
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002821- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002822
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002823- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2824 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2825 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2826
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002827- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2828 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2829 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2830
2831- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2832 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2833 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2834 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2835 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2836 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2837 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2838 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002839
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002840- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2841 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2842 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002843
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002844- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2845 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2846 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2847 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2848 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002849
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002850- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2851 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2852 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002853
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002854- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2855 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002856
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002857- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2858 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2859 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2860 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2861 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002862
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002863- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2864 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2865 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2866
2867- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2868 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2869 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002870
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002871- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2872 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2873 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2874 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002875 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002876
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002877- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2878 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002879
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002880- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2881 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002882
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002883- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002884 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002885 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2886 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002887
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002888
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002889What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002890===============================
2891
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002892*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2893
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002894Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002895--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002896
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002897- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2898 with a custom metaclass.
2899
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002900Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002901-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002902
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002903- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2904 are proxies.
2905
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002906Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002907-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002908
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002909- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2910 very short strings.
2911
2912- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2913 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2914 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2915 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2916 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2917
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002918Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002919-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002920
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002921- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2922 close or delete time).
2923
2924- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2925 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2926
2927- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2928
2929- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002930 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002931
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002932Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002933-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002934
2935Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002936-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002937
2938C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002939-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002940
2941New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002942-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002943
2944Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002945-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002946
2947Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002948-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002949
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002950- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2951
2952- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2953 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2954
2955- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2956 deleted at process exit time.
2957
2958- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2959 in backslash.
2960
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002961Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002962----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002963
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002964- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2965 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2966 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2967
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002968
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002969What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002970===========================
2971
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002972*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2973
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002974Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002975--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002976
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002977- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2978 been extensively updated. See
2979
2980 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2981
2982 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2983
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002984- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2985 deleted!
2986
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002987- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2988 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2989 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2990 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2991 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2992
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002993- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2994
2995 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2996 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2997
2998 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2999 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3000 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3001 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3002 supported anyway.
3003
3004 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3005 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3006
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003007- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3008 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3009 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3010 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3011 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003012
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003013- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3014 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3015 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3016
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003017Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003018-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003019
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003020- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3021 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3022 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3023 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3024 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3025 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003026 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3027 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3028 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3029 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003030
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003031- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3032 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3033 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3034
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003035Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003036-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003037
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003038- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3039
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003040Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003041-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003042
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003043- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3044 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3045 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3046 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3047 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3048 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3049
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003050- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3051
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003052- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3053
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003054- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3055
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003056- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3057 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3058 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3059
3060- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3061
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003062Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003063-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003064
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003065- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3066 off a search on Google.
3067
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003068Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003069-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003070
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003071- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3072 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3073 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3074 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3075 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3076 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3077 other platforms should do likewise.
3078
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003079- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3080 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3081 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3082
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003083C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003084-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003085
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003086- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3087 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3088 producing key-value pairs.
3089
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003090- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003091 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003092 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3093 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3094 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3095 previously went unchallenged.
3096
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003097New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003098-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003099
3100Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003101-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003102
3103Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003104-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003105
3106Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003107----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003108
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003109- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3110 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003111
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003112- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3113 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3114 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3115 home.
3116
3117
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003118What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003119===========================
3120
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003121*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3122
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003123Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003124--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003125
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003126- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3127 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003128
3129 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003130 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003131
3132 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3133 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003134 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003135 This needs to be documented.
3136
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003137- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3138 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3139
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003140- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3141 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3142 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3143
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003144- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3145 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3146
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003147- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3148 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3149 class forbids it).
3150
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003151- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3152 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3153 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3154
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003155- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3156
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003157Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003158-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003159
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003160- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3161 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003162 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003163
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003164- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3165 (like 1 + '').
3166
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003167Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003168-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003169
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003170- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3171 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3172 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3173 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003174 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003175 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3176
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003177- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3178 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3179 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3180 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3181
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003182- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3183 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003184 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3185 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3186 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003187
3188- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3189 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003190
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003191- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3192 bytes on its input.
3193
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003194Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003195-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003196
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003197- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003198 convenience function.
3199
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003200- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3201 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3202 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003203 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3204 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3205 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3206 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3207 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3208 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003209
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003210- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3211 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3212 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3213 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3214
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003215- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3216 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3217 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3218
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003219- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3220 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3221 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3222 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3223
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003224- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3225 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003226 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003227 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3228 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3229 new -l and -e options.
3230
3231- statcache is now deprecated.
3232
3233- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3234 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003235 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003236 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3237 time properly taken into account.
3238
3239- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3240 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3241 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3242 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3243
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003244Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003245-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003246
3247Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003248-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003249
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003250- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3251 is built with libdb3 if available.
3252
3253- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3254
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003255C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003256-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003257
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003258- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3259 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3260 PySequence_Size().
3261
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003262- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3263
3264- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3265 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3266 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3267
3268- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3269 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3270
3271- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3272 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3273
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003274New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003275-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003276
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003277- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3278 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3279
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003280- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3281 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3282
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003283- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3284
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003285Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003286-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003287
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003288- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3289 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3290
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003291Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003292-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003293
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003294Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003295----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003296
3297- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3298 removed completely in the next release.
3299
3300- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3301 OSX.
3302
3303- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3304 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3305
3306- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3307
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003308
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003309What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003310===========================
3311
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003312*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3313
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003314Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003315--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003316
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003317- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003318 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003319 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003320 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3321 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003322 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3323 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003324 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3325 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003326
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003327- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3328 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3329
3330- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3331 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3332
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003333Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003334-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003335
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003336- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3337 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3338 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3339 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3340 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3341 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3342 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3343 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3344
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003345- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3346 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3347 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3348 example).
3349
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003350- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003351 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003352 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003353 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003354
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003355- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3356 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3357 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003358 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003359
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003360- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3361 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3362 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3363 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3364 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3365 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3366
3367 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3368
3369 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3370
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003371Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003372-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003373
3374- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3375
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003376- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3377
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003378- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3379 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003380
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003381- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3382 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3383 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3384 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3385 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3386 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003387 attributes.
3388
3389- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3390 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3391 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003392
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003393- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3394 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3395 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003396
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003397- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3398 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3399 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003400 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3401 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3402
3403- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3404 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003405
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003406Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003407-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003408
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003409- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3410 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3411
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003412- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3413 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3414 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3415 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3416
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003417- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3418 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3419 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3420 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3421
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003422 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3423 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3424 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3425 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3426 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3427 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3428 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3429 without losing information).
3430
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003431- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003432 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3433 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3434 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3435 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3436 module).
3437
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003438 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003439 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3440 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3441 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3442 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003443
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003444- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003445 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3446 encoding.
3447
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003448- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3449 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3450
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003451- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003452 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3453
3454- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3455 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3456 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3457 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3458
3459- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3460
3461- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3462 ON, and OFF.
3463
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003464- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3465 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3466
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003467Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003468-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003469
3470- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3471 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3472 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003473
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003474- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3475 been added: -X and -E.
3476
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003477Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003478-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003479
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003480- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3481 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3482
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003483C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003484-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003485
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003486- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3487 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3488 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3489 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3490 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3491
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003492- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3493 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3494 as long) arguments.
3495
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003496- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3497 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3498 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3499 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3500 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3501 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3502
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003503- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3504 input.
3505
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003506New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003507-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003508
3509Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003510-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003511
3512Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003513-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003514
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003515- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3516 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3517 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3518
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003519- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3520 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3521 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003522 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003523
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003524 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3525 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3526 import signal
3527 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003528
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003529 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003530 while 1:
3531 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003532 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003533 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3534 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3535 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3536 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003537
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003538
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003539What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3540===========================
3541
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003542*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3543
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003544Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003545--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003546
3547- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3548 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3549 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3550
3551- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3552 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3553 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3554 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3555 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3556 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3557 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003558
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003559- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003560 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003561 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3562 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3563 associate a docstring with a property.
3564
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003565- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3566 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3567 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3568 other built-in object types.
3569
3570- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3571 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3572 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3573 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3574 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3575
3576- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3577 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3578
3579- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3580 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003581 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003582 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3583 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3584 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3585 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3586 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3587
3588- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3589 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3590 class.
3591
3592- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3593 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3594 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3595 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3596
3597- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3598 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3599 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3600 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3601
3602- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3603 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3604
3605- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3606 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3607 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3608 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3609 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003610 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003611 with the same value as s.
3612
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003613- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3614
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003615Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003616----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003617
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003618- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3619
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003620- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3621 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3622 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3623 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3624 objects.
3625
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003626- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3627 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003628 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3629 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3630
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003631- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3632 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3633 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3634
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003635Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003636-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003637
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003638- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3639 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3640 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3641 by the instances.
3642
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003643- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3644 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3645 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3646
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003647- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3648 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3649 before the entire comparison is complete.
3650
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003651- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3652 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3653 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3654
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003655- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3656 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3657 getwriter().
3658
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003659- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3660 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3661
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003662- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003663 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3664 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3665
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003666- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3667 iterable object.
3668
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003669- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3670 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003671
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003672- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3673 authentication.
3674
3675- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3676 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003677
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003678- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003679 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3680 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3681 a sample driver.)
3682
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003683Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003684-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003685
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003686- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3687 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3688 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3689 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3690 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3691 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3692 kernel has large file support.
3693
3694- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3695 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3696 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3697 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3698 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3699
3700- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3701 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3702 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3703
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003704C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003705-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003706
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003707- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3708 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3709
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003710New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003711-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003712
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003713- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3714 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3715
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003716Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003717-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003718
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003719- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3720 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3721 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3722 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3723 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3724
3725- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3726 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3727 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3728 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3729
3730- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3731 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3732
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003733Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003734-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003735
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003736- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003737 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3738 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003739
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003740
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003741What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3742===========================
3743
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003744*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3745
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003746Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003747----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003748
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003749- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3750 big to represent as a C double.
3751
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003752- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3753 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3754 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3755 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3756 restriction).
3757
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003758- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3759 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3760 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3761 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3762 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3763
3764 >>> dir([])
3765 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3766 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3767 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3768 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3769 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3770 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3771 'reverse', 'sort']
3772
3773 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3774
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003775- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003776 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3777 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3778 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3779 OverflowError exception.
3780
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003781- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003782 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003783 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3784 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3785 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3786 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3787 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003788 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003789 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3790 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3791
3792 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3793 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3794 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3795 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003796
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003797- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003798 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3799 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3800 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3801 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3802 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3803 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3804 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3805 once it is created.
3806
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003807- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3808 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3809 (key, value) pairs.
3810
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003811- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003812 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3813 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3814
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003815- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3816 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3817 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3818 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3819 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003820
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003821- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003822 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3823 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3824
3825 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3826
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003827- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003828 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3829
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003830Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003831-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003832
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003833- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003834 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3835 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003836
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003837- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3838 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3839 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3840 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3841 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3842 in this area anymore).
3843
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003844- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3845 threading.Timer.
3846
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003847- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3848 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3849
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003850- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003851 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3852
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003853- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003854 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3855 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3856 converted to Python longs.
3857
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003858- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003859 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3860
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003861- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3862 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3863 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3864
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003865Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003866-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003867
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003868- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3869 division operators as per PEP 238.
3870
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003871Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003872-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003873
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003874- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3875 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3876 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3877 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3878
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003879C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003880-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003881
3882- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003883
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003884- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3885 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003886 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003887
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003888 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3889 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003890 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003891 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003892
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003893- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003894 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3895 module:
3896
3897 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003898
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003899 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3900 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003901
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003902 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3903 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003904
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003905 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3906
3907 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3908
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003909- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003910 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3911 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3912 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003913
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003914New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003915-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003916
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003917- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3918 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3919 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3920 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3921 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003922
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003923Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003924-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003925
3926Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003927-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003928
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003929- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3930 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3931 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3932 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003933 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3934 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3935 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3936 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3937 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003938
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003939- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003940 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3941
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003942
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003943What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3944===========================
3945
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003946*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3947
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003948Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003949-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003950
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003951- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3952 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3953
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003954- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3955 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3956 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003957
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003958- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3959 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3960 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3961 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003962
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003963- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3964
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003965- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003966
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003967Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003968-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003969
3970- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003971 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003972 the module docstring for details.
3973
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003974Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003975-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003976
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003977- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003978 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3979 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3980 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003981
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003982- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3983 Nick Mathewson.
3984
3985Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003986----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003987
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003988- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3989 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3990 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3991 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3992 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3993 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3994 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3995 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3996
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003997- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3998 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3999 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4000 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4001
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004002- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4003 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4004 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4005 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4006 come a long way).
4007
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004008- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4009 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4010 write filters for these warnings).
4011
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004012- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4013 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4014 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4015 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4016 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4017
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004018- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4019 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4020 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4021 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4022 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4023 older distribution.
4024
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004025Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004026-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004027
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004028- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4029 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004030 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004031
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004032- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4033 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4034 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4035
4036- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4037
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004038- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4039
4040- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4041
4042- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4043
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004044- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004045
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004046- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4047
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004048New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004049-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004050
4051C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004052-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004053
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004054- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4055 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4056 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4057 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4058 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4059 against buffer overruns.
4060
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004061- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004062 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4063 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004064 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4065 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4066 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4067
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004068- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4069 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4070 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4071 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4072 deprecated.
4073
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004074Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004075-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004076
4077- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4078 relevant is found.
4079
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004080
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004081What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004082===========================
4083
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004084*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4085
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004086Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004087----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004088
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004089- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4090 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4091 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4092 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4093 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4094 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4095 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4096 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004097 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004098 repaired.
4099
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004100- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004101 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004102 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4103 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4104 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4105 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4106 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4107 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4108 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4109 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4110
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004111- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4112 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4113 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4114 leading BMO character).
4115
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004116- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4117 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4118 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4119
4120 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4121 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4122 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004123
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004124 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4125 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4126 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4127 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4128 for various simple to use conversions.
4129
4130 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4131 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4132
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004133 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4134 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4135 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4136 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4137 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4138 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4139 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4140 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4141 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4142 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4143 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4144 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4145 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4146 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4147 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004148
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004149- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4150 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4151 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004152 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004153 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004154
4155 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004156 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4157 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4158 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4159 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4160 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004161 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4162 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004163
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004164 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4165 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4166 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004167 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004168
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004169- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4170 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4171 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4172 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4173 floating arithmetic,
4174
4175 x = 9007199254740992.0
4176 print long(x)
4177
4178 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4179 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4180 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4181 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4182 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4183 functions are of good quality).
4184
4185 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4186 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4187 algorithms to break.
4188
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004189- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4190 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4191 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4192 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4193 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4194 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4195 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4196 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4197 order.
4198
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004199- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4200 operation along the most common code paths.
4201
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004202- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4203 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4204
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004205- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4206 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4207 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4208 {}.update(UserDict())
4209
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004210- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4211 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4212 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4213 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4214 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4215 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4216 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4217 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4218
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004219- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004220 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004221
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004222 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004223 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4224 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004225 join() method of strings
4226 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004227 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4228 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004229 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004230 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004231
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004232- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4233 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4234
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004235- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4236 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4237
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004238- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4239 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4240 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4241 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4242
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004243- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4244 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004245 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004246 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4247 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004248
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004249- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4250
4251
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004252Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004253-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004254
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004255- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004256 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004257 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4258 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4259
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004260- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4261 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4262
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004263- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4264 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4265 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4266 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4267
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004268- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4269 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4270 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4271
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004272- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4273
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004274- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4275
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004276- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4277 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4278 that are still imported into string.py).
4279
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004280- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4281
4282- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4283 Now it does.
4284
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004285- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4286
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004287- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4288 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4289 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4290 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4291 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004292 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4293 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004294
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004295- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4296 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4297 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4298 'help(object)'.
4299
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004300Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004301-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004302
4303- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004304 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004305 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4306 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4307
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004308- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004309 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4310 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004311
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004312C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004313-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004314
4315- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4316 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004317
4318----
4319
4320**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**