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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Georg Brandl533ff6f2006-03-08 18:09:27 +000015- Patch #1434038: property() now uses the getter's docstring if there is
16 no "doc" argument given. This makes it possible to legitimately use
17 property() as a decorator to produce a read-only property.
18
Guido van Rossum9aa37ab2006-03-07 18:54:08 +000019- PEP 357, patch 1436368: add an __index__ method to int/long and a matching
20 nb_index slot to the PyNumberMethods struct. The slot is consulted instead
21 of requiring an int or long in slicing and a few other contexts, enabling
22 other objects (e.g. Numeric Python's integers) to be used as slice indices.
23
Neal Norwitz995acdf2006-03-07 05:01:00 +000024- Fixed various bugs reported by Coverity's Prevent tool.
25
Brett Cannonbf364092006-03-01 04:25:17 +000026- PEP 352, patch #1104669: Make exceptions new-style objects. Introduced the
27 new exception base class, BaseException, which has a new message attribute.
28 KeyboardInterrupt and SystemExit to directly inherit from BaseException now.
29 Raising a string exception now raises a DeprecationWarning.
30
Thomas Woutersfb609f42006-02-28 16:37:25 +000031- Patch #1438387, PEP 328: relative and absolute imports. Imports can now be
32 explicitly relative, using 'from .module import name' to mean 'from the same
33 package as this module is in. Imports without dots still default to the
34 old relative-then-absolute, unless 'from __future__ import
35 absolute_import' is used.
36
Brett Cannona7446e32006-02-27 23:39:10 +000037- Properly check if 'warnings' raises an exception (usually when a filter set
38 to "error" is triggered) when raising a warning for raising string
39 exceptions.
40
Neal Norwitz0023a2f2006-02-27 23:24:48 +000041- CO_GENERATOR_ALLOWED is no longer defined, this behavior is the default.
42 The name was removed from Include/code.h.
43
Neal Norwitzeb651252006-02-27 16:47:12 +000044- PEP 308: conditional expressions were added (x if cond else y).
45
Guido van Rossum1968ad32006-02-25 22:38:04 +000046- Patch 1433928:
47 - The copy module now "copies" function objects (as atomic objects).
48 - dict.__getitem__ now looks for a __missing__ hook before raising
49 KeyError.
50
Tim Peters84ef21c2006-02-28 20:39:06 +000051- PEP 343: with statement implemented. Needs ``from __future__ import
52 with_statement``. Use of 'with' as a variable will generate a warning.
53 Use of 'as' as a variable will also generate a warning (unless it's
Neal Norwitz055ec242006-02-28 20:06:49 +000054 part of an import statement).
Guido van Rossum1a5e21e2006-02-28 21:57:43 +000055 The following objects have __context__ methods:
56 - The built-in file type.
57 - The thread.LockType type.
58 - The following types defined by the threading module:
59 Lock, RLock, Condition, Semaphore, BoundedSemaphore.
60 - The decimal.Context class.
Guido van Rossumc2e20742006-02-27 22:32:47 +000061
Marc-André Lemburgfe4b34c2006-02-19 15:22:22 +000062- Fix the encodings package codec search function to only search
63 inside its own package. Fixes problem reported in patch #1433198.
64
65 Note: Codec packages should implement and register their own
66 codec search function. PEP 100 has the details.
67
Martin v. Löwis18e16552006-02-15 17:27:45 +000068- PEP 353: Using ssize_t as the index type.
69
Neal Norwitzfc76d632006-01-10 06:03:13 +000070- Patch #1400181, fix unicode string formatting to not use the locale.
71 This is how string objects work. u'%f' could use , instead of .
72 for the decimal point. Now both strings and unicode always use periods.
73
Neal Norwitz671b9e32006-01-09 07:07:12 +000074- Bug #1244610, #1392915, fix build problem on OpenBSD 3.7 and 3.8.
75 configure would break checking curses.h.
76
Georg Brandlcd4d1e82005-12-27 17:37:07 +000077- Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be
78 built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set.
79
Neal Norwitzc10978f2005-12-19 06:07:16 +000080- Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
81
Neal Norwitz5d0ad502005-12-19 04:27:42 +000082- Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
83
Neal Norwitzdb83eb32005-12-18 05:29:30 +000084- Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
85
Neal Norwitze7214a12005-12-18 05:03:17 +000086- Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
87 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
88
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000089- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
Barry Warsawd3c38ff2006-03-07 09:46:03 +000090 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.subversion. Build number
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000091 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
92
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000093- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
94 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +000095 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000096
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +000097- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
98 now encodes backslash correctly.
99
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +0000100- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
101
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +0000102- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
103 and long longs.
104
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +0000105- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
106 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
107 message in this case.
108
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +0000109- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
110 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
111 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
112 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
113 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
114
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000115- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +0000116
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000117- Speed up some Unicode operations.
118
Martin v. Löwisbd260da2006-02-26 19:42:26 +0000119- A new AST parser implementation was completed. The abstract
120 syntax tree is available for read-only (non-compile) access
Martin v. Löwis577b5b92006-02-27 15:23:19 +0000121 to Python code; an _ast module was added.
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000122
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +0000123- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +0000124 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
125
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +0000126- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
127
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +0000128- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
129 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
130
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +0000131- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
132
133- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
134
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +0000135- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
136 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
137 was empty.
138
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +0000139- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
140 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
141
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +0000142- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +0000143 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +0000144
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +0000145- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
146 codes.
147
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +0000148- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
149 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
150 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
151
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +0000152- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
153 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
154
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +0000155- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +0000156 (fixes bug #1119418).
157
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +0000158- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
159
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +0000160- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
161 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
162
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +0000163- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
164 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
165 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
166
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +0000167- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
168
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +0000169- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
170 reference counts in some error exit cases.
171
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000172- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
173 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
174 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
175 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
176 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
177 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
178 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
179 realloc.
180
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000181- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
182 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
183
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000184- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
185 like their int counterparts.
186
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000187- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
188 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
189 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
190 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
191 for a longer write-up of the problem).
192
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000193- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
194 serializing floats.
195
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000196- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
197 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
198 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
199
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000200- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
201 278.
202
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000203- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
204 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
205 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
206 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000207 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000208 PyNumber_*().
209 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
210
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000211- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
212 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
213 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
214 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
215
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000216- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
217 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
218 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
219 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
220 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
221
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000222- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
223 disabled caused a crash.
224
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000225- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
226 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
227
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000228- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000229 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
230
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000231- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
232
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000233- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000234 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
235 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
236 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000237
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000238- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
239
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000240- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
241 returning None.
242
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000243- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000244 ('\') with a specific error message.
245
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000246- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
247
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000248- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
249 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
250
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000251- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000252 an ferror() call.
253
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000254- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
255 list.sort().
256
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000257- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
258 (2+3) --> (5).
259
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000260- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
261
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000262- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
263 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000264
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000265- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
266 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
267 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
268
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000269- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
270 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
271 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
272
Tim Petersf4e69282006-02-27 17:15:31 +0000273- Patch #1413181: changed ``PyThreadState_Delete()`` to forget about the
274 current thread state when the auto-GIL-state machinery knows about
275 it (since the thread state is being deleted, continuing to remember it
276 can't help, but can hurt if another thread happens to get created with
277 the same thread id).
278
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000279Extension Modules
280-----------------
281
Martin v. Löwis480f1bb2006-03-09 23:38:20 +0000282- The unicodedata module was updated to the 4.1 version of the Unicode
283 database. The 3.2 version is still available as unicodedata.db_3_2_0
284 for applications that require this specific version (such as IDNA).
285
Neal Norwitzb62c4332006-03-04 18:35:47 +0000286- The timing module is no longer built by default. It was deprecated
287 in PEP 4 in Python 2.0 or earlier.
288
Guido van Rossum1968ad32006-02-25 22:38:04 +0000289- Patch 1433928: Added a new type, defaultdict, to the collections module.
290 This uses the new __missing__ hook behavior added to dict (see above).
291
Georg Brandldbd83392006-02-20 09:42:33 +0000292- Bug #854823: socketmodule now builds on Sun platforms even when
293 INET_ADDRSTRLEN is not defined.
294
Georg Brandlf4f44152006-02-18 22:29:33 +0000295- Patch #1393157: os.startfile() now has an optional argument to specify
296 a "command verb" to invoke on the file.
297
Neal Norwitz082b2df2006-02-07 07:04:46 +0000298- Bug #876637, prevent stack corruption when socket descriptor
299 is larger than FD_SETSIZE.
300
Neal Norwitz0e6bc8c2006-02-05 05:45:43 +0000301- Patch #1407135, bug #1424041: harmonize mmap behavior of anonymous memory.
302 mmap.mmap(-1, size) now returns anonymous memory in both Unix and Windows.
303 mmap.mmap(0, size) should not be used on Windows for anonymous memory.
304
Martin v. Löwis57a34e82006-02-04 19:12:37 +0000305- Patch #1422385: The nis module now supports access to domains other
306 than the system default domain.
307
Martin v. Löwis14694662006-02-03 12:54:16 +0000308- Use Win32 API to implement os.stat/fstat. As a result, subsecond timestamps
309 are reported, the limit on path name lengths is removed, and stat reports
310 WindowsError now (instead of OSError).
311
Gregory P. Smithcfc4a8d2006-01-29 19:46:23 +0000312- Add bsddb.db.DBEnv.set_tx_timestamp allowing time based database recovery.
313
Neal Norwitz62a21122006-01-25 05:21:55 +0000314- Bug #1413192, fix seg fault in bsddb if a transaction was deleted
315 before the env.
316
Martin v. Löwis11017b12006-01-14 18:12:57 +0000317- Patch #1103116: Basic AF_NETLINK support.
318
Neal Norwitz3b4fff82006-01-11 08:54:45 +0000319- Bug #1402308, (possible) segfault when using mmap.mmap(-1, ...)
320
Neal Norwitz88bbd732006-01-10 07:05:44 +0000321- Bug #1400822, _curses over{lay,write} doesn't work when passing 6 ints.
322 Also fix ungetmouse() which did not accept arguments properly.
323 The code now conforms to the documented signature.
324
Neal Norwitz5e3d8622006-01-09 06:24:35 +0000325- Bug #1400115, Fix segfault when calling curses.panel.userptr()
326 without prior setting of the userptr.
327
Neal Norwitz40c6b472006-01-05 05:43:35 +0000328- Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb.
329
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000330- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
331
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000332- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
333 problem on AIX.
334
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000335- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
336
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000337- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
338
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000339- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
340
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000341- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
342 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
343
Gregory P. Smithe101df92006-01-24 20:09:45 +0000344- Patch #1407992, fixes broken bsddb module db associate when using
345 BerkeleyDB 3.3, 4.0 or 4.1.
346
347- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 4.4
348
349- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 3.2
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000350
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000351- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
352 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
353
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000354- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
355
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000356- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
357 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
358
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000359- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
360 returns in cStringIO.c.
361
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000362- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
363 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
364
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000365- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
366
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000367- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
368
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000369- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
370 the file system encoding.
371
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000372- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
373 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000374
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000375- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
376
377- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000378 line without newlines.
379
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000380- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
381 on Windows.
382
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000383- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000384 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
385
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000386- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
387 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
388 for large or negative values.
389
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000390- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000391 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000392
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000393- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
394
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000395- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
396 if available on the platform.
397
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000398- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
399 available on the platform.
400
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000401- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
402 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
403
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000404- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
405
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000406- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
407 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
408 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
409
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000410- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
411
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000412- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
413 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
414
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000415- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000416 file size.
417
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000418- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
419
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000420- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
421 {remove_history,replace_history}
422
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000423- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
424 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000425
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000426- stat_float_times is now True.
427
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000428- array.array objects are now picklable.
429
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000430- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
431 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
432
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000433- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
434 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
435 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
436
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000437- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
438 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000439
440Library
441-------
442
Georg Brandle2b46772006-03-09 23:22:43 +0000443- Patch #1446372: quit and exit can now be called from the interactive
444 interpreter to exit.
445
Barry Warsawd3c38ff2006-03-07 09:46:03 +0000446- The function get_count() has been added to the gc module, and gc.collect()
447 grew an optional 'generation' argument.
448
Martin v. Löwisfbab90e2006-03-05 13:36:04 +0000449- A library msilib to generate Windows Installer files, and a distutils
450 command bdist_msi have been added.
451
Guido van Rossum1a5e21e2006-02-28 21:57:43 +0000452- PEP 343: new module contextlib.py defines decorator @contextmanager
453 and helpful context managers nested() and closing().
454
Martin v. Löwis415ed932006-02-27 19:56:30 +0000455- The compiler package now supports future imports after the module docstring.
456
Georg Brandl8f7c54e2006-02-20 08:40:38 +0000457- Bug #1413790: zipfile now sanitizes absolute archive names that are
458 not allowed by the specs.
459
Georg Brandlc98eeed2006-02-19 14:57:47 +0000460- Patch #1215184: FileInput now can be given an opening hook which can
461 be used to control how files are opened.
462
Georg Brandlc029f872006-02-19 14:12:34 +0000463- Patch #1212287: fileinput.input() now has a mode parameter for
464 specifying the file mode input files should be opened with.
465
Georg Brandl67e9fb92006-02-19 13:56:17 +0000466- Patch #1215184: fileinput now has a fileno() function for getting the
467 current file number.
468
Georg Brandl602b9ba2006-02-19 13:26:36 +0000469- Patch #1349274: gettext.install() now optionally installs additional
470 translation functions other than _() in the builtin namespace.
471
Georg Brandle4662172006-02-19 09:51:27 +0000472- Patch #1337756: fileinput now accepts Unicode filenames.
473
Georg Brandl7b4e7c22006-02-18 21:10:56 +0000474- Patch #1373643: The chunk module can now read chunks larger than
475 two gigabytes.
476
Georg Brandl21dd1af2006-02-17 13:35:13 +0000477- Patch #1417555: SimpleHTTPServer now returns Last-Modified headers.
478
Georg Brandlbd3bc4d2006-02-17 09:52:53 +0000479- Bug #1430298: It is now possible to send a mail with an empty
480 return address using smtplib.
481
Georg Brandl0e1abe22006-02-17 09:48:14 +0000482- Bug #1432260: The names of lambda functions are now properly displayed
483 in pydoc.
Georg Brandl501dd0d2006-02-17 09:45:40 +0000484
Martin v. Löwis00756902006-02-05 17:09:41 +0000485- Patch #1412872: zipfile now sets the creator system to 3 (Unix)
486 unless the system is Win32.
487
Tim Petersda1329b2006-02-27 16:50:01 +0000488- Patch #1349118: urllib now supports user:pass@ style proxy
Martin v. Löwis3e865952006-01-24 15:51:21 +0000489 specifications, raises IOErrors when proxies for unsupported protocols
490 are defined, and uses the https proxy on https redirections.
491
Georg Brandl531ceba2006-01-21 07:20:56 +0000492- Bug #902075: urllib2 now supports 'host:port' style proxy specifications.
493
494- Bug #1407902: Add support for sftp:// URIs to urlparse.
Georg Brandl89f35ac2006-01-20 17:24:23 +0000495
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000496- Bug #1371247: Update Windows locale identifiers in locale.py.
497
Neal Norwitzf60cd472006-01-14 07:05:13 +0000498- Bug #1394565: SimpleHTTPServer now doesn't choke on query parameters
Georg Brandl45ab2332006-01-13 17:05:56 +0000499 any more.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000500
Georg Brandl4edd9892006-01-13 16:59:46 +0000501- Bug #1403410: The warnings module now doesn't get confused
502 when it can't find out the module name it generates a warning for.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000503
Martin v. Löwis412ed3b2006-01-08 10:45:39 +0000504- Patch #1177307: Added a new codec utf_8_sig for UTF-8 with a BOM signature.
505
Neal Norwitzab86f8e2005-12-23 21:44:36 +0000506- Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
507
Neal Norwitz338e7862005-12-23 21:27:46 +0000508- Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
509 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
510 LoadError subclasses IOError.
511
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000512- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000513 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
514 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
515 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
516 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
517
518 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
519 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
520 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
521 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
522 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000523
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000524- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
525 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
526 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
527
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000528- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
529
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000530- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
531
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000532- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
533 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
534 illegal argument)
535
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000536- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
537 is an error in the format string.
538
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000539- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
540
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000541- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000542 "parent" argument.
543
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000544- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
545 for padding.
546
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000547- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
548 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
549
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000550- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
551 to get the correct encoding.
552
553- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
554 languages.
555
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000556- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
557
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000558- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
559
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000560- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
561
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000562- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
563 functionality.
564
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000565- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
566
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000567- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
568 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
569
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000570- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
571 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
572 match the Content-Length header.
573
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000574- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
575
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000576- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
577 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000578 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000579
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000580- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
581
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000582- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
583
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000584- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
585 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
586
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000587- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
588 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
589 Tkdnd.
590
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000591- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
592 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
593
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000594- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
595 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
596
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000597- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000598 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
599
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000600- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
601 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
602
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000603- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
604 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
605
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000606- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000607 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000608
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000609- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
610
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000611- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
612 error messages.
613
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000614- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
615
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000616- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
617 Bug #1224621.
618
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000619- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
620 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
621 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
622 terminates by raising StopIteration.
623
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000624- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
625
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000626- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
627 component of the path.
628
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000629- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
630 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
631 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
632 class at all.
633
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000634- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
635 files to PyPI.
636
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000637- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
638 them to PyPI.
639
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000640- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
641 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
642 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
643 work as expected.
644
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000645- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
646 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
647
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000648- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000649 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
650
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000651- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
652
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000653- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
654 to build.
655
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000656- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
657 symbolic links on Windows.
658
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000659- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000660 profile.py if available.
661
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000662- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
663
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000664- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
665 in LWPCookieJar.
666
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000667- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
668
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000669- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
670
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000671- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
672
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000673- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
674
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000675- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
676
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000677- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
678
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000679- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
680
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000681- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
682
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000683- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
684 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
685 be exploited in various ways.
686
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000687- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000688 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
689
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000690- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
691 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
692
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000693- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000694 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
695
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000696- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
697
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000698- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
699
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000700- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
701
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000702- Enhancements to the csv module:
703
704 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000705 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000706 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000707 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
708 reporting.
709 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
710 dictates.
711 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000712 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000713 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000714 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
715 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000716 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
717 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000718 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000719 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
720 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
721 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
722 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
723 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
724 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
725 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
726 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
727 without first creating a dialect class.
728 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
729 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
730 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000731 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000732 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
733 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000734 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
735 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
736 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
737 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000738 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
739 This has been fixed.
740
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000741- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
742 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
743 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
744 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
745
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000746- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
747
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000748- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
749 (Bug #951915).
750
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000751- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
752 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
753 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000754 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000755
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000756- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
757
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000758- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
759 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
760
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000761- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
762
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000763- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
764
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000765- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
766
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000767- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
768
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000769- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
770
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000771- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
772 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
773 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
774
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000775- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000776 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000777
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000778- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
779 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
780 tokenizer with very long source lines.
781
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000782- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called
783 immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
784 ``.decompress()`` calls.
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000785
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000786- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
787 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000788
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000789- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
790 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
791
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000792- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
793 correctly.
794
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000795- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
796 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
797 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
798 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
799 between two lines.
800
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000801- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
802 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
803 handlers.
804
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000805- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000806 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
807 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000808
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000809- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
810 considering it exactly like a '*'.
811
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000812- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
813 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000814
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000815- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
816
Gustavo Niemeyer548148812006-01-31 18:34:13 +0000817- Patch #1413711: Certain patterns of differences were making difflib
818 touch the recursion limit.
819
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000820Build
821-----
822
Martin v. Löwis86d66262006-02-17 08:40:11 +0000823- Patch #1432345: Make python compile on DragonFly.
824
Martin v. Löwis856bf9a2006-02-14 20:42:55 +0000825- Build support for Win64-AMD64 was added.
826
Martin v. Löwisa55e55e2006-02-11 15:55:14 +0000827- Patch #1428494: Prefer linking against ncursesw over ncurses library.
828
Martin v. Löwisfd9a72a2006-01-08 10:07:33 +0000829- Patch #881820: look for openpty and forkpty also in libbsd.
830
Martin v. Löwis64c33dd2006-01-03 07:42:14 +0000831- The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3).
832 The zlib module is now builtin on Windows.
833
Martin v. Löwisd5845ec2005-12-30 12:31:38 +0000834- Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.
835
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000836- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
837 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
838
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000839- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
840 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
841
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000842- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
843 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
844 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000845 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000846
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000847- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
848 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
849 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
850
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000851- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
852
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000853- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
854 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
855
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000856- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
857 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
858 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
859 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
860 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
861 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
862 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
863 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
864
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000865- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
866 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
867 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
868 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
869
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000870C API
871-----
872
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000873- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
874
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000875- Removed PyRange_New().
876
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000877- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
878 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
879 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
880 mappings.
881
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000882
883Tests
884-----
885
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000886- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000887
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000888- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
889 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
890
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000891
892Documentation
893-------------
894
Georg Brandl8cb30772006-01-20 09:34:29 +0000895- Bug #1402224: Add warning to dl docs about crashes.
896
Georg Brandla3a93ae2006-01-20 09:14:36 +0000897- Bug #1396471: Document that Windows' ftell() can return invalid
898 values for text files with UNIX-style line endings.
899
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000900- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
901
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000902- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
903
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000904- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
905
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000906- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
907
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000908- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
909
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000910- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
911
912- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
913
914- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
915
916- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
917
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000918- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
919 Closes bug #1166582.
920
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000921- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
922 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
923 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
924
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000925Mac
926---
927
928
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000929New platforms
930-------------
931
932- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
933
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000934
935Tools/Demos
936-----------
937
Brett Cannonacde7342006-03-01 04:28:00 +0000938- Created Misc/Vim/vim_syntax.py to auto-generate a python.vim file in that
939 directory for syntax highlighting in Vim. Vim directory was added and placed
940 vimrc to it (was previous up a level).
941
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000942- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
943 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
944 source files that need an encoding declaration.
945 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
946
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000947- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
948
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000949- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000950
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000951- Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
952 wiggle over by a pixel.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000953
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000954What's New in Python 2.4 final?
955===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000956
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000957*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000958
959Core and builtins
960-----------------
961
962- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
963 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
964 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
965
966
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000967What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
968==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000969
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000970*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000971
972Core and builtins
973-----------------
974
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000975- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
976 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
977 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
978
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000979
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000980Library
981-------
982
983- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
984 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
985 raised is re-raised.
986
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000987- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
988 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
989
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000990- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
991 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
992 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
993 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
994 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
995 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
996 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
997 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
998 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
999 by the slice are recomputed now.
1000
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +00001001- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +00001002
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00001003Build
1004-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +00001005
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +00001006- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
1007 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
1008 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00001009
1010C API
1011-----
1012
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +00001013- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
1014
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00001015
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001016What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
1017================================
1018
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +00001019*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001020
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001021License
1022-------
1023
1024The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
1025is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
1026changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
1027Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
1028intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
1029durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
1030the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
1031License::
1032
1033 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
1034
1035says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
1036to Python 2.1.1.
1037
1038The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
1039License Version 2.
1040
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001041Core and builtins
1042-----------------
1043
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +00001044- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
1045 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
1046 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
1047 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
1048 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
1049 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
1050 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +00001051 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +00001052 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
1053 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
1054
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +00001055- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001056
1057Extension Modules
1058-----------------
1059
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +00001060- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
1061 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
1062 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
1063 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001064
1065Library
1066-------
1067
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +00001068- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
1069 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
1070 returned.
1071
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +00001072- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
1073
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +00001074- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
1075 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
1076
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +00001077- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
1078
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +00001079- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
1080 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001081
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +00001082- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
1083
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +00001084- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
1085
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +00001086- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +00001087 the source code is updated and reloaded.
1088
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001089Build
1090-----
1091
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +00001092- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001093
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001094What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
1095================================
1096
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +00001097*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001098
1099Core and builtins
1100-----------------
1101
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001102- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +00001103 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
1104
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +00001105- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
1106 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
1107 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
1108 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
1109
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001110- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
1111 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
1112
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +00001113- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
1114 constant.
1115
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001116- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
1117 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
1118 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
1119 large), and to anomalies such as
1120 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
1121 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
1122 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
1123 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001124
1125Extension modules
1126-----------------
1127
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +00001128- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
1129 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001130 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
1131 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
1132 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001133
1134Library
1135-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001136
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001137- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001138 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001139 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
1140 --swig-cpp.
1141
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +00001142- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
1143 it is set.
1144
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +00001145- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +00001146
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +00001147- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
1148 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
1149 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
1150 Closes bug #1039270.
1151
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001152- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +00001153
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +00001154 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001155 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
1156 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
1157 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
1158 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
1159 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
1160 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
1161 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
1162 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
1163 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
1164 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
1165 + Updates to documentation.
1166
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +00001167- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
1168 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
1169 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
1170 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
1171
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001172- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001173
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +00001174- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
1175 applications should use the getmember function.
1176
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +00001177- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
1178
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +00001179- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
1180 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
1181 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
1182 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
1183 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
1184 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
1185 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
1186 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
1187 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
1188
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001189- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
1190 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +00001191 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001192
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001193- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
1194 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
1195 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
1196 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
1197 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
1198 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
1199 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
1200 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001201
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001202- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
1203 the new public features (of which there are many).
1204
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +00001205- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001206 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
1207 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
1208 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
1209 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001210 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001211
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +00001212- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
1213
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +00001214- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
1215 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
1216 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
1217 options.
1218
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +00001219- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
1220 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
1221 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
1222 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
1223 conditions under which non-string values work.
1224
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001225Build
1226-----
1227
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001228- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1229 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1230 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1231
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001232- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1233 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1234 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1235 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1236 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001237
1238C API
1239-----
1240
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001241- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1242 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1243
1244- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1245
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001246- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1247 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1248 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1249 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1250 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1251 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1252 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1253 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1254 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1255
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001256- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1257
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001258- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1259 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1260 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001261
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001262Tests
1263-----
1264
1265- test__locale ported to unittest
1266
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001267Mac
1268---
1269
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001270- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1271 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1272 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001273
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001274Tools/Demos
1275-----------
1276
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001277- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1278 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1279 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1280 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1281 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001282
1283
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001284What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1285=================================
1286
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001287*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001288
1289Core and builtins
1290-----------------
1291
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001292- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001293 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1294
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001295- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1296 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1297 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1298 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1299 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1300 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1301 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1302 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001303 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1304 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1305 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1306 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1307 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001308
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001309- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1310 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1311 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1312 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1313 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1314
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001315- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1316
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001317- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1318 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1319
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001320- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1321 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1322 modified the list.
1323
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001324- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1325 functions is now writable.
1326
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001327- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1328 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1329 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1330 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1331
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001332- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1333 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1334 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1335 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1336 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001337
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001338- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1339 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1340
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001341Extension modules
1342-----------------
1343
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001344- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1345
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001346- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1347 data.
1348
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001349- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1350 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1351 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1352 supposed to have been truncated away.
1353
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001354- Added socket.socketpair().
1355
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001356- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1357 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1358
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001359- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001360 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1361
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001362Library
1363-------
1364
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001365- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001366 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001367
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001368- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1369 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1370
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001371- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1372 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1373
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001374- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1375
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001376- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1377 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001378
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001379- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1380 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1381
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001382- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1383
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001384- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1385
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001386- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1387
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001388- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1389 Percivall.
1390
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001391- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1392 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1393
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001394- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1395 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1396 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001397 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001398
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001399- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1400 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1401 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1402 and exponent.
1403
1404- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1405
1406- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001407 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001408 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1409
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001410- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1411 to the readline module.
1412
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001413- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001414 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1415 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001416
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001417- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1418 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1419 contains symlinks.
1420
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001421- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1422 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1423
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001424- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1425 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1426 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1427
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001428- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1429 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1430 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1431 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1432 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1433 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1434 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1435 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1436 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1437 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1438 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1439 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1440 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1441
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001442- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1443
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001444Tools/Demos
1445-----------
1446
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001447- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1448 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1449
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001450- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1451
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001452Build
1453-----
1454
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001455- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1456 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1457 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1458 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1459 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1460 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1461 plans to do so.
1462
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001463- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1464 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1465
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001466- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1467 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1468
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001469- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1470 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1471
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001472- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1473 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1474
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001475- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1476 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1477
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001478C API
1479-----
1480
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001481..
1482
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001483Documentation
1484-------------
1485
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001486- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1487 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1488
1489- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1490 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1491 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001492
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001493New platforms
1494-------------
1495
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001496- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1497
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001498Tests
1499-----
1500
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001501..
1502
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001503Windows
1504-------
1505
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001506- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1507 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1508 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1509 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1510 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1511 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1512 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1513 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1514 the problem.
1515
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001516Mac
1517---
1518
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001519..
1520
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001521
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001522What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1523=================================
1524
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001525*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001526
1527Core and builtins
1528-----------------
1529
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001530- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1531 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1532 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1533 sensitive code.
1534
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001535- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001536 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001537
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001538 @staticmethod
1539 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001540
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001541 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001542
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001543- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1544 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1545 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1546 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1547 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1548 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1549 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1550 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1551 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1552 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1553 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1554
1555 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1556 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1557 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1558 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1559 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1560 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1561 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1562
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001563- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1564 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1565
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001566- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001567 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001568
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001569- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001570 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001571 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1572
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001573- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001574 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1575 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1576
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001577- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1578 types that support garbage collection.
1579
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001580- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1581
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001582- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1583 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1584 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1585 Jython.
1586
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001587- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1588
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001589- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1590 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1591
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001592- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1593 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1594 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001595
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001596- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1597 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1598 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1599
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001600Extension modules
1601-----------------
1602
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001603- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1604
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001605Library
1606-------
1607
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001608- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1609 TIS-620
1610
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001611- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1612 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1613 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1614 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1615 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1616 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1617 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1618 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1619 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1620 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1621
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001622- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1623
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001624- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1625 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1626 same as when the argument is omitted).
1627 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1628
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001629- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1630
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001631- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1632 schemes are offered.
1633
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001634- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1635
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001636- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1637 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1638 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1639
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001640- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1641
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001642- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1643 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1644
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001645- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1646 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1647 when dummy_threading is being used.
1648
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001649- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1650 from a tarfile.
1651
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001652- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001653 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001654
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001655- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1656 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1657 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1658 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1659
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001660- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1661 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1662
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001663- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1664 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1665 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1666 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1667 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1668 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1669 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1670 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1671 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1672 by some other method in progress).
1673
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001674- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1675 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1676 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001677
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001678- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1679
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001680- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1681 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1682 AM Kuchling.
1683
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001684- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1685 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1686 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1687
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001688- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1689 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1690 instead of unsigned.
1691
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001692- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001693 no longer part of the public API.
1694
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001695- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1696 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1697 string methods of the same name).
1698
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001699- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001700 SF patch 945642.
1701
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001702- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1703
1704 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1705
1706 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1707 DocTestSuites.
1708
1709- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1710 that provide thread-local data.
1711
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001712- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1713 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1714
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001715- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1716
1717- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1718 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1719 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1720
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001721- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1722
1723 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1724 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1725 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001726
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001727 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1728 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1729 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1730 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1731
1732 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1733 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1734
1735 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1736 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1737 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1738 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1739
1740 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1741 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1742 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1743 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1744 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1745
1746 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1747 wrapping help output.
1748
1749 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1750 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1751 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001752
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001753C API
1754-----
1755
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001756- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1757 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1758 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1759 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1760 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1761 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1762 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1763 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1764 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1765 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1766 its visible semantics have not changed.
1767
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001768- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1769 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1770
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001771Documentation
1772-------------
1773
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001774- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001775
1776 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001777 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001778
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001779 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001780
1781 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1782
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001783- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001784
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001785Tests
1786-----
1787
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001788- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001789 platforms that use the Makefile.
1790
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001791- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1792 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1793 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1794
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001795
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001796What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1797=================================
1798
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001799*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001800
1801Core and builtins
1802-----------------
1803
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001804- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1805 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1806 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1807 objects now (one object instead of three).
1808
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001809- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1810 Windows DLLs.
1811
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001812- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1813 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001814
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001815- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1816 a new .pyc magic.
1817
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001818- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1819 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1820 be there.
1821
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001822- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1823 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1824 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1825
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001826- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1827 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1828 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1829
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001830- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1831
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001832- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1833 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1834 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001835
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001836- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1837 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1838
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001839- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1840
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001841- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001842 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001843
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001844- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1845
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001846- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1847
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001848- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1849 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1850
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001851- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1852 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1853 Fixes bug #858016 .
1854
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001855- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1856 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1857 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1858
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001859- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1860 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1861 improves their performance (about 35%).
1862
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001863- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1864 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1865 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1866
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001867- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1868 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1869 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1870 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1871
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001872- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1873 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001874 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001875 length is not known).
1876
1877- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1878 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001879 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1880 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001881 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1882
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001883- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1884 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1885
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001886- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1887 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1888 keyword arguments.
1889
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001890- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1891 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1892 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1893
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001894- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1895 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1896 cases.
1897
1898- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1899 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1900 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1901 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1902 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1903 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1904 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1905 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1906 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1907 a release build.
1908
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001909- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1910 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1911
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001912- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001913 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001914
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001915- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1916 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1917 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1918 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1919 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1920 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1921 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1922 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1923 destroyed.
1924
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001925- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1926 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1927 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1928 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1929 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1930 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1931 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1932 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1933
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001934- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1935 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1936 character other than a space.
1937
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001938- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1939 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1940 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1941 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1942 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1943 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1944 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1945 attributes with the same name.
1946
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001947- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1948 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1949 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1950 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1951 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1952 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1953 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1954 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1955 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1956 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1957 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1958 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1959 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1960 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001961
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001962- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1963 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1964 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1965 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1966 This has been repaired.
1967
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001968- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1969
1970- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1971
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001972- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1973 over a sequence.
1974
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001975- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001976 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001977
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001978- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1979
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001980- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1981 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1982 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1983 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1984 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1985 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1986 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1987 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1988
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001989- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1990 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1991 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1992
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001993- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1994 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1995 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1996 freelist.
1997
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001998- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1999 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
2000
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00002001- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
2002 number.
2003
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00002004- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
2005 a TypeError exception.
2006
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00002007- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
2008 820195.
2009
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00002010- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
2011 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
2012 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
2013
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002014- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00002015 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
2016 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00002017
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00002018- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
2019 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
2020 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
2021
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00002022- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
2023 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002024 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00002025
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002026- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00002027 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
2028 the first call.
2029
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00002030
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002031Extension modules
2032-----------------
2033
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00002034- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
2035 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
2036
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002037- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
2038 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
2039 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
2040 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
2041 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
2042 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
2043 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00002044
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00002045- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
2046
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00002047- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
2048
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00002049- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
2050 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
2051
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00002052- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
2053 fewer false positives.
2054
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00002055- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
2056 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
2057
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002058- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00002059 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
2060
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00002061- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002062 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00002063 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00002064 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
2065 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00002066
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00002067- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
2068 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
2069 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
2070 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
2071
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00002072- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
2073 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
2074 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
2075 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
2076 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
2077 #897625.
2078
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00002079- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
2080 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
2081
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00002082- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
2083 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
2084 and pops on either side of the deque.
2085
2086- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
2087 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
2088
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00002089- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
2090 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
2091 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
2092 other functions that expect a function argument.
2093
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00002094- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
2095
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002096- os.getsid was added.
2097
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00002098- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
2099 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
2100 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
2101
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00002102- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
2103
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00002104- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
2105
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00002106- readline.clear_history was added.
2107
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00002108- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
2109
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00002110- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
2111
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00002112- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
2113
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00002114- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
2115
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00002116- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
2117
2118- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
2119
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00002120- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
2121
2122- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
2123
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002124- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
2125 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
2126 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
2127
2128- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
2129 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
2130 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
2131 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
2132 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
2133 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
2134 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
2135
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00002136- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
2137 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
2138 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
2139 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002140
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002141- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002142 iterators from a single iterable.
2143
2144- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
2145 of raising a TypeError exception.
2146
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00002147- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
2148 as parameter.
2149
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002150Library
2151-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00002152
Armin Rigoa871ef22006-02-08 12:53:56 +00002153- Added a new module: cProfile, a C profiler with the same interface as the
2154 profile module. cProfile avoids some of the drawbacks of the hotshot
2155 profiler and provides a bit more information than the other two profilers.
2156 Based on "lsprof" (patch #1212837).
2157
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00002158- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
2159
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00002160- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
2161 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
2162 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002163
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00002164- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
2165 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
2166 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00002167
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00002168- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00002169
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00002170- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
2171 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00002172
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00002173- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
2174 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
2175
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002176- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
2177
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002178- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002179 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002180
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002181- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00002182 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002183
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00002184- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
2185
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00002186- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
2187 on cygwin and mingw32.
2188
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00002189- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
2190
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00002191- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
2192 module.
2193
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00002194- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
2195 installation scheme for all platforms.
2196
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002197- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00002198 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002199
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002200- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
2201 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
2202 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
2203
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00002204- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
2205 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
2206 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
2207
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00002208- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
2209
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00002210- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
2211
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00002212- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
2213 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
2214
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00002215- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
2216 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
2217 type pattern with the same value exists.
2218
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00002219- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
2220 when run from the command prompt).
2221
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002222- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
2223 not taken into consideration when caching value.
2224
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00002225- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
2226 default sort).
2227
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00002228- Added global runctx function to profile module
2229
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00002230- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
2231
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00002232- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2233
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002234- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2235
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002236- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002237 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2238 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2239 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2240 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2241 accordingly.
2242
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002243- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2244 decoding standards.
2245
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002246- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2247 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2248 called for all requests.
2249
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002250- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2251 they are passed to the compiler.
2252
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002253- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2254 indent, width and depth.
2255
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002256- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2257 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2258
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002259- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2260 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2261
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002262- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2263
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002264- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2265
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002266- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2267
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002268- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2269 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2270
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002271- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002272 for better performance.
2273
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002274- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002275
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002276- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2277 a string).
2278
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002279- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2280
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002281- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2282
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002283- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2284
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002285- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2286
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002287- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2288 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2289 list of fieldnames.
2290
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002291- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2292 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2293
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002294- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2295
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002296- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2297 empty lists.
2298
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002299- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2300 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2301 and shelves.
2302
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002303- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2304 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2305
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002306- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002307 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2308 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002309
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002310- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2311 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002312 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002313
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002314- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002315 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2316 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2317
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002318- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2319 and removed in Py2.4.
2320
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002321- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2322
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002323- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2324
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002325Tools/Demos
2326-----------
2327
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002328- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2329 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2330
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002331- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2332
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002333- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2334 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2335 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2336 destination in situations where both files are given.
2337
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002338- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2339 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2340 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2341 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2342
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002343- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2344
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002345- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2346 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2347 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2348 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2349 now.
2350
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002351- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2352 in effect
2353
2354- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2355 C-c C-h
2356
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002357- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2358 -d option was given.
2359
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002360Build
2361-----
2362
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002363- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2364 build under OS X.
2365
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002366- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2367 --enable-profiling.
2368
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002369- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2370 is configured --with-tsc.
2371
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002372- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2373 on AMD64.
2374
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002375- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2376 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2377
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002378- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2379 removed.
2380
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002381- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2382 supported (see PEP 11).
2383
2384- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2385
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002386- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2387
2388- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2389 (see PEP 11).
2390
2391- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2392 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2393
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002394C API
2395-----
2396
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002397- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2398 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2399 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2400
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002401- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2402 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2403 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2404 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2405
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002406- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2407 generator objects.
2408
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002409- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2410 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002411 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2412 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002413
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002414- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2415 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2416
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002417- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2418 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2419 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2420 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2421 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2422
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002423- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2424 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2425 about 10% faster.
2426
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002427- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2428 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2429
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002430- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2431 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2432 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2433 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2434
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002435Windows
2436-------
2437
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002438- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2439 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2440 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2441 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2442
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002443- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2444 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2445 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2446
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002447
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002448What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2449===============================
2450
2451*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2452
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002453IDLE
2454----
2455
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002456- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2457 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2458 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2459 context-menu actions.
2460
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002461- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2462 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2463 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2464 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2465 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2466 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2467 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2468 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2469 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2470
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002471
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002472What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2473=============================================
2474
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002475*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002476
2477Core and builtins
2478-----------------
2479
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002480- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002481 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002482 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2483
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002484Extension modules
2485-----------------
2486
2487- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2488 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2489 than once. This has been fixed.
2490
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002491- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2492 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2493 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2494 call.
2495
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002496- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2497
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002498Library
2499-------
2500
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002501- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2502 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2503
2504- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2505 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2506 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2507 restored.
2508
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002509IDLE
2510----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002511
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002512- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002513
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002514Build
2515-----
2516
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002517- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2518 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2519
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002520C API
2521-----
2522
2523Windows
2524-------
2525
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002526- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2527 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2528
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002529- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2530
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002531Mac
2532---
2533
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002534- Various fixes to pimp.
2535
2536- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2537
2538- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2539 more problems than it solves.
2540
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002541
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002542What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2543=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002544
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002545*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2546
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002547Core and builtins
2548-----------------
2549
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002550- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2551 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2552
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002553- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2554 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002555 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002556
2557- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2558 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2559 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002560 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002561
2562- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2563 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002564
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002565- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2566 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2567 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2568
2569- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002570 770247.
2571
2572- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002573
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002574Extension modules
2575-----------------
2576
2577- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2578 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2579
2580- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2581
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002582- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2583
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002584- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2585 contained within the _strptime module.
2586
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002587- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2588 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2589
2590- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002591 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2592
2593- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2594 the find_class attribute, if present.
2595
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002596- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002597
2598 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2599 (SF bug 763298).
2600
2601 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002602 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2603 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2604 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002605
2606 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2607
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002608Library
2609-------
2610
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002611- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2612
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002613- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2614 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2615 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2616 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2617 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2618 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2619 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2620 or Tester().
2621
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002622- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2623 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2624 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2625 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2626 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2627 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2628 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2629 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2630 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002631
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002632 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002633
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002634- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2635 weren't before was an oversight.
2636
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002637- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2638 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2639
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002640- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2641 when there are no lines.
2642
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002643- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2644 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2645
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002646- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2647 to child processes.
2648
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002649- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2650
2651- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2652
2653- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2654 xmlrpclib.
2655
2656- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2657 responses.
2658
2659- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2660 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2661
2662- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2663 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2664 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2665
2666- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2667 used as patterns.
2668
2669- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2670 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2671 than Tk 8.3.
2672
2673- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2674
2675- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002676
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002677Tools/Demos
2678-----------
2679
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002680- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2681
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002682- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2683
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002684- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002685
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002686Build
2687-----
2688
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002689- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2690
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002691- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2692
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002693- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2694 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002695
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002696- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2697 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2698 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002699
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002700C API
2701-----
2702
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002703- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2704 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2705
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002706Windows
2707-------
2708
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002709- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2710 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2711 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2712 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2713 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2714 Python exception ::
2715
2716 thread.error: can't start new thread
2717
2718 is raised now.
2719
2720- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2721 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2722 instead of from DLL teardown.
2723
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002724Mac
2725---
2726
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002727- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002728 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002729 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2730 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2731 the executable in the bundle.
2732
2733- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002734
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002735- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2736
2737- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2738 on Panther.
2739
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002740What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2741================================
2742
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002743*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002744
2745Core and builtins
2746-----------------
2747
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002748- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2749 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2750 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2751 with the -i option.
2752
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002753- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2754 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2755
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002756- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2757 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2758
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002759- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2760 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2761 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2762 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2763 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2764 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2765 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2766 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2767 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2768 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2769 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2770 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2771 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002772
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002773- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2774 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2775 embedded in a lambda expression.
2776
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002777- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2778 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2779 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2780 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2781 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2782
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002783- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2784 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2785 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2786
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002787- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2788 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2789
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002790- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2791 It's writable again.
2792
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002793- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2794 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2795 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002796 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002797
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002798- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2799 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2800 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2801
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002802Extension modules
2803-----------------
2804
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002805- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2806 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2807
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002808- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2809 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2810 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2811 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2812
2813- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2814 collection.
2815
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002816- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2817 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2818 unique within a single program run.
2819
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002820- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2821 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2822
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002823- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2824 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2825
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002826- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2827 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002828
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002829- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2830
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002831- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2832 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2833
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002834- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2835 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2836 for many BSD-derived systems.
2837
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002838
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002839Library
2840-------
2841
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002842- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2843 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2844 primary ones:
2845
2846 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2847 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2848 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2849
2850 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2851 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2852 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2853 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2854 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2855 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2856
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002857- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2858 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2859 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2860 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2861 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2862 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2863 argument.
2864
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002865- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2866 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2867 in the archive.
2868
2869- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2870 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2871
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002872- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2873 569574).
2874
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002875- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2876 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2877 no more.
2878
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002879- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2880 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2881 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2882 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2883 code coverage.
2884
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002885- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2886 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2887 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002888 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2889 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002890
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002891- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2892 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2893 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002894 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002895
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002896- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2897
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002898- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2899 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2900 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2901 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2902
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002903- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2904 handling.
2905
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002906- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2907 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2908
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002909- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2910 in socket.py.
2911
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002912- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2913
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002914- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2915 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2916 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2917 opener with proxy support.
2918
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002919- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2920
2921- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2922
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002923Tools/Demos
2924-----------
2925
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002926- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2927
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002928- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2929
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002930- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2931 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002932
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002933- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2934 files.
2935
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002936Build
2937-----
2938
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002939- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002940 different root directory.
2941
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002942C API
2943-----
2944
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002945- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2946 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2947 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2948 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2949 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2950 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2951 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2952 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2953 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2954 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2955
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002956- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2957 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2958 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2959 from Python.
2960
2961
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002962New platforms
2963-------------
2964
2965None this time.
2966
2967Tests
2968-----
2969
2970- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2971 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2972
2973Windows
2974-------
2975
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002976- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2977
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002978- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2979 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2980 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2981 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2982 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2983 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2984 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2985 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2986 that's what it's for.
2987
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002988Mac
2989---
2990
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002991- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2992 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2993 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2994 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002995- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2996 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2997- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002998
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002999SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
3000------------------------------------
3001
3002430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
3003598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
3004622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
3005661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
3006683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
3007697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
3008713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
3009724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
3010727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
3011729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
3012730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
3013731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
3014732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
3015733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
3016735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
3017740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
3018744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
3019745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
3020747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
3021749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
3022751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
3023753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
3024755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
3025757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
3026760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
3027
3028
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003029What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
3030================================
3031
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00003032*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003033
3034Core and builtins
3035-----------------
3036
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00003037- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
3038 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
3039
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00003040- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
3041 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
3042 and cannot be strings).
3043
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00003044- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
3045 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
3046 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
3047 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
3048
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00003049- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
3050 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
3051 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
3052 Python itself.
3053
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00003054- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
3055 the referenced object, if it has one.
3056
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00003057- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
3058 the thread started at
3059 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
3060
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00003061- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
3062 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
3063 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
3064 placed on a list index.
3065
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00003066- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
3067 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
3068 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
3069 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
3070
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003071- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
3072 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
3073 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
3074 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
3075 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
3076 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
3077 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
3078
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00003079- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
3080 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
3081 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
3082 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
3083 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
3084
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00003085- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
3086 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00003087
3088- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
3089 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
3090 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
3091 #693195.)
3092
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00003093- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
3094 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003095
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00003096- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00003097 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00003098 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
3099 interpreter executions, would fail.
3100
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00003101- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00003102 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00003103 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00003104
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003105Extension modules
3106-----------------
3107
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00003108- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
3109 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
3110 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
3111 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
3112
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00003113- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
3114 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
3115
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00003116- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
3117 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
3118 and Greg Chapman.)
3119
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003120- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
3121 recursively.
3122
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00003123- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00003124 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
3125 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
3126 leaks.
3127
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00003128- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
3129
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00003130- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
3131 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
3132 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
3133 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
3134 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
3135 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
3136 #705836.
3137
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00003138- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00003139 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
3140
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00003141- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
3142 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
3143 See SF bug #692416.
3144
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00003145- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
3146 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
3147
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00003148- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
3149 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
3150 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003151
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003152- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00003153 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
3154 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
3155
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00003156- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
3157 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
3158 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
3159 timeouts to work properly.
3160
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003161Library
3162-------
3163
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003164- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
3165 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
3166 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
3167 future release.
3168
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00003169- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
3170 for querying platform dependent features.
3171
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00003172- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00003173
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00003174- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
3175 pickle protocol versions.
3176
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00003177- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
3178 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
3179 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
3180
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00003181- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
3182
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00003183- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
3184 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
3185 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
3186 modules.
3187
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00003188- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
3189 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
3190 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
3191
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003192- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
3193 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
3194
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00003195- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
3196 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
3197 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
3198
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003199- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00003200 MS Office extensions.
3201
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00003202- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
3203 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
3204
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00003205- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
3206 execution speed of expressions and statements.
3207
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003208- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
3209 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
3210 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
3211 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
3212 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
3213 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
3214
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003215- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
3216 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
3217 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003218
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00003219- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
3220 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
3221 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
3222
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00003223- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
3224
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00003225- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
3226 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
3227 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
3228
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003229Tools/Demos
3230-----------
3231
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00003232- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3233 See the module docstring for details.
3234
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003235Build
3236-----
3237
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003238- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3239 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003240
3241C API
3242-----
3243
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003244- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3245
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003246- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3247 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3248 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3249
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003250- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3251 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003252
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003253 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3254 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3255 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003256
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003257- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003258 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3259
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003260- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3261 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3262 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003263
3264New platforms
3265-------------
3266
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003267None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003268
3269Tests
3270-----
3271
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003272- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3273 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003274
3275Windows
3276-------
3277
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003278- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3279 function.
3280
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003281- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3282 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003283
3284Mac
3285---
3286
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003287- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3288 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003289
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003290- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3291 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003292
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003293- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3294 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3295 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003296
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003297- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003298 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3299 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003300
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003301- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3302 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003303
3304
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003305What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3306=================================
3307
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003308*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003309
3310Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003311-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003312
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003313- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3314 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3315 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3316
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003317- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3318 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3319 (SF patch #664376.)
3320
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003321- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3322 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3323 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3324 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3325 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3326 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003327 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003328
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003329- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3330 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3331 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3332 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003333 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003334
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003335- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3336 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3337 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3338 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3339 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3340 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3341 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3342 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3343 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3344 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3345 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3346
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003347- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3348 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3349 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3350 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3351 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3352 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3353
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003354- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3355 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3356
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003357- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3358 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3359 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3360 case.)
3361
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003362- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3363 passed as unicode strings.
3364
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003365- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3366 See SF bug #683467.
3367
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003368- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3369 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3370
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003371- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3372
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003373- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3374
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003375- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3376 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3377 arguments.
3378
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003379- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3380 See SF bug #667147.
3381
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003382- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003383 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003384 See SF bug #676155.
3385
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003386- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003387 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003388 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3389 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3390 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3391 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3392 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3393 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003394
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003395Extension modules
3396-----------------
3397
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003398- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3399 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3400 tp_as_number pointer.
3401
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003402- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3403 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3404 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3405 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3406 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3407
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003408- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3409
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003410- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3411
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003412- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003413 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003414 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3415 patch #678531.)
3416
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003417- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3418 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3419
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003420- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3421 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3422
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003423- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3424
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003425- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3426 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3427 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3428
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003429- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3430
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003431- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3432 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3433
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003434- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003435
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003436- datetime changes:
3437
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003438 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3439
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003440 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3441 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3442 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3443 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3444 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3445 now.
3446
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003447 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003448 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3449 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003450
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003451 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003452 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003453 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3454 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3455 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3456 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003457
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003458 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3459 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3460 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003461 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3462
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003463 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3464 by a later example coded by Guido.
3465
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003466 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003467 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3468 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3469 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003470 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3471 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3472
3473 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3474 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3475 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3476 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3477 tzinfo subclass instance.
3478
3479 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3480 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3481 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3482 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3483 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3484 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3485 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3486 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003487
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003488 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3489 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3490 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3491 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3492 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003493 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3494
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003495 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003496
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003497 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3498 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3499 as a naive datetime object.
3500
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003501 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3502 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3503 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3504
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003505 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3506 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3507 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3508 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3509 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3510 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3511 comparison.
3512
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003513 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3514 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3515 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3516 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003517 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003518
3519 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003520
3521 and ::
3522
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003523 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3524
3525 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3526 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3527 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3528 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3529
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003530 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3531 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3532 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3533 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3534 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3535
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003536 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3537 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003538 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3539 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003540
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003541Library
3542-------
3543
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003544- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3545 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3546
3547- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3548 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3549 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3550 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3551 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3552 See PEP 307 for details.
3553
3554- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3555 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3556
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003557- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3558 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003559 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003560 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3561 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003562 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003563
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003564- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3565 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3566
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003567- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3568 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3569 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3570
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003571- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3572
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003573- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3574 exception.
3575
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003576- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3577 class.
3578
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003579- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3580 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3581 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3582
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003583- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3584 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3585
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003586- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003587 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3588 See SF bug #659228.
3589
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003590- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3591 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3592 See SF patch #651082.
3593
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003594- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003595
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003596- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3597 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3598
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003599- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003600 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003601
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003602- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3603 DOS paths from other platforms.
3604
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003605Tools/Demos
3606-----------
3607
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003608- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3609 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3610 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3611 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3612 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3613 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3614 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3615 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3616 example:
3617
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003618 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3619 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003620
3621 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3622
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003623
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003624Build
3625-----
3626
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003627- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3628 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3629 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003630 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3631
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003632 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3633
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003634- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3635 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3636 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3637 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3638 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3639 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3640 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3641 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3642 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3643
3644- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3645 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3646 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3647 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3648
3649- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3650 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3651
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003652C API
3653-----
3654
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003655- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3656 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003657
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003658- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3659 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3660 tp_as_number pointer.
3661
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003662- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3663 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3664 (SF #681367)
3665
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003666- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3667 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3668 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3669 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003670
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003671Tests
3672-----
3673
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003674- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003675 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3676 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3677 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3678 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3679 pydoc.)
3680
3681- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3682
3683- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003684
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003685Windows
3686-------
3687
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003688- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3689 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3690 time).
3691
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003692- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3693 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3694
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003695- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3696 release without strong cryptography.
3697
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003698- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003699 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003700
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003701- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3702 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3703
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003704Mac
3705---
3706
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003707- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3708 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003709
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003710- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3711 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3712 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003713
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003714- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3715 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003716
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003717- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3718 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3719 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3720 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003721
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003722- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003723 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3724 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3725 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003726
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003727
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003728What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003729=================================
3730
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003731*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003732
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003733Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003734--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003735
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003736- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3737
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003738- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3739 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003740 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003741 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003742 a different meaning than before.
3743
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003744- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003745 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003746 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003747
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003748- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003749 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003750 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003751
3752- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3753 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3754 and deallocation.
3755
3756- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3757 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3758
3759- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3760 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3761 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3762 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3763 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3764
3765- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3766 now detected by the garbage collector.
3767
3768- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3769 [SF bug 519621]
3770
3771- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3772 identifier.
3773
3774- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3775 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3776 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3777 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3778 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3779 [SF bug 563060]
3780
3781- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3782 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3783 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3784 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3785 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3786
3787- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3788 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3789 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3790
3791- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3792
3793- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3794 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3795 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3796 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3797 state of the slots would be lost.)
3798
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003799Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003800-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003801
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003802- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003803 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3804 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3805 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3806 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003807 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3808 Jython 2.1.
3809
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003810- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003811 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003812 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3813 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3814 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3815 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3816 these, see PEP 302.
3817
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003818- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3819 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3820 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3821
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003822- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3823 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3824 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3825
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003826- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3827 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3828 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3829
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003830- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3831 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3832 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3833 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3834 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3835 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3836 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3837 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3838 releases or implementations.
3839
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003840- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003841 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3842 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003843
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003844- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3845 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3846
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003847- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3848 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3849 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3850
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003851- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3852 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3853
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003854- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3855 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003856 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3857 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003858
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003859- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3860 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3861 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3862 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3863 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3864
3865 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3866 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3867 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3868 pattern.
3869
3870 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3871 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3872 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3873 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3874
3875 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3876 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3877 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3878 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3879 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3880 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3881
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003882- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3883 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3884 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3885 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3886 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3887 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3888 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3889 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003890
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003891- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3892 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3893 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3894 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3895 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003896 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3897 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3898 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3899 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3900 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3901 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3902 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003903
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003904- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3905 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3906
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003907- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3908 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3909 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3910 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3911 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3912 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3913 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3914 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3915 to Zack Weinberg!
3916
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003917- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3918 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3919 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3920 type. This has been fixed now.
3921
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003922- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3923 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3924 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3925
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003926- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3927 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3928 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3929 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3930 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3931 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3932 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3933 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003934 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003935
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003936- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3937 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3938 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003939
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003940- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3941 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3942 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3943 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3944 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3945 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3946 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3947 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003948 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003949 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3950 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3951
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003952- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3953 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3954 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3955 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3956 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3957 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3958 this.)
3959
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003960- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3961 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003962 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003963 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003964 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3965 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003966 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3967 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003968
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003969- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3970 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3971 currently running.
3972
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003973- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3974 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3975 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3976 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3977
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003978- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3979 as directory names.
3980
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003981- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3982 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3983
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003984- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3985 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3986
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003987- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003988 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3989 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003990
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003991- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3992 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3993 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3994 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3995 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3996
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003997- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3998 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3999 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
4000 removed.
4001
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00004002- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
4003 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
4004 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
4005
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00004006- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
4007 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
4008 to __debug__.
4009
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00004010- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
4011 string to the left with zeros. For example,
4012 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
4013
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00004014- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
4015 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
4016 deprecated now.
4017
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00004018- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
4019 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
4020 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00004021
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00004022- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
4023 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
4024 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
4025 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
4026 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00004027
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00004028- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
4029 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
4030
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00004031- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
4032 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
4033 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004034 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00004035 is backward compatible.
4036
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00004037- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
4038 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
4039 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
4040 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
4041 could access a pointer to freed memory.
4042
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00004043- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
4044 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
4045 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
4046 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
4047 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
4048 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004049
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00004050- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
4051 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
4052
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004053- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
4054 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
4055
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004056- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
4057 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
4058 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
4059 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
4060 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
4061
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00004062- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
4063 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
4064 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
4065
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004066- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00004067 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
4068
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00004069- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
4070 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
4071 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00004072
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00004073- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
4074 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
4075
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00004076- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
4077 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
4078 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
4079
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00004080- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
4081
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004082Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004083-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004084
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00004085- Added three operators to the operator module:
4086 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
4087 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
4088 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
4089
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00004090- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
4091
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00004092- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
4093 archives.
4094
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004095- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
4096 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
4097 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
4098
4099 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
4100
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00004101- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
4102 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
4103 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00004104 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00004105
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00004106- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
4107 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
4108 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
4109 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00004110 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
4111 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
4112 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
4113 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00004114
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00004115- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
4116 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00004117
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00004118- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
4119
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00004120- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
4121 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
4122
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00004123- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
4124 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
4125 supported.
4126
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00004127- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
4128
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00004129- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
4130 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00004131
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00004132- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
4133 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
4134
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00004135- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
4136
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004137- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
4138 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
4139
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00004140- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
4141 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
4142 functions but callable type objects.
4143
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004144- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004145 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004146 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004147
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00004148- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
4149 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00004150
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00004151- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
4152 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00004153
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00004154- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
4155 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
4156 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
4157 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
4158
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00004159- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
4160 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00004161
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00004162- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
4163 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
4164 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
4165 and __imul__.
4166
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00004167- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00004168 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
4169 is called.
4170
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00004171- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
4172 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
4173 interpreter was compiled.
4174
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004175- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
4176 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
4177 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004178 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004179 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
4180 1, not 2.
4181
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00004182- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
4183 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
4184 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
4185 limit.
4186
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00004187- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
4188 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
4189 bug #623464.
4190
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00004191- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
4192 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
4193 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
4194 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
4195
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004196Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004197-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004198
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00004199- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
4200
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00004201- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
4202 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
4203 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
4204 with Python 2.3a2.
4205
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00004206- os.path exposes getctime.
4207
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004208- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004209 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004210 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004211 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004212 unit tests of floating point results.
4213
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00004214- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
4215 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
4216 has been increased.
4217
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00004218- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
4219 executed.
4220
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00004221- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
4222 postinstallation script.
4223
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00004224- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
4225 test the current module.
4226
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004227- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00004228 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
4229 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
4230 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
4231 this behavior needs to be controlled.
4232
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004233- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004234 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004235 Ward's Optik package.
4236
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004237- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4238 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4239 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4240 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4241
4242- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4243 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004244 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004245
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004246- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4247 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4248 shelf are binary pickles.
4249
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004250- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4251 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4252
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004253- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4254 modules are iterators now.
4255
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004256- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4257 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4258 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4259 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4260 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4261 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004262
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004263- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4264 with their entity value.
4265
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004266- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4267
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004268- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4269 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004270
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004271- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4272 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004273 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004274
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004275- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4276 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4277 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4278 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4279 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4280 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4281 main():
4282
4283 import locale
4284 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4285
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004286- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4287 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4288
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004289- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4290 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4291 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4292 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4293 to the new standard.
4294
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004295- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4296 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4297 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4298 an extension to the database.
4299
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004300- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4301 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4302 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4303 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004304 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004305
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004306- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004307 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004308
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004309- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4310 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4311 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4312 bounded integers.
4313
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004314- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4315 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4316 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4317 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4318 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4319 in existence.
4320
4321 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4322 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4323 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4324 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4325 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4326 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4327
4328 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4329 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4330 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4331 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4332
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004333- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4334 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4335 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4336
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004337- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4338
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004339- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4340 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4341 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4342 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4343
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004344- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4345 argument.
4346
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004347- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4348 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4349 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4350 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4351 [SF patch 560794].
4352
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004353- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4354 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4355 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004356 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4357 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4358 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004359
4360- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4361 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004362
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004363- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4364 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4365 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4366 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004367
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004368- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4369 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4370 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4371 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4372 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4373
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004374- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004375
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004376- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4377
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004378- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4379 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4380 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4381 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4382 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4383 identical to None.
4384
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004385- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4386 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4387 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4388 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4389 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4390 results now.
4391
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004392- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4393 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4394
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004395- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4396 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4397 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4398 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4399 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4400 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4401 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4402 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4403
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004404- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4405
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004406- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4407 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4408
4409- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4410 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4411 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4412 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4413 and other systems.
4414
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004415- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4416 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4417 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4418 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 +00004419 work well with these.
4420
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004421- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4422
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004423- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004424 connections.
4425
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004426- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4427 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4428 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4429
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004430- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4431 sets
4432
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004433- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4434 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4435 name.
4436
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004437- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4438 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4439 passed in.
4440
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004441- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004442 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004443 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4444 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004445
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004446- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4447
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004448- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4449
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004450- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4451 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4452 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4453
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004454- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4455 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4456 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4457 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004458 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004459
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004460- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004461 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004462 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004463
4464- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4465 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4466 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4467
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004468- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004469 the value of its expression argument.
4470
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004471- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4472 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4473 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4474
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004475- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4476 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4477 skipstone browser was included.
4478
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004479- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4480 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4481
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004482Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004483-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004484
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004485- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4486 names in addition to accepting file names.
4487
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004488- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4489 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4490 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4491 still used and useful.)
4492
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004493- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4494 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4495 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4496 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004497
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004498- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4499 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4500 the generated binary.
4501
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004502Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004503-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004504
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004505- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4506
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004507- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4508 except in the hands of experts.
4509
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004510- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004511 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4512 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4513 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004514
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004515- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4516 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4517 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4518 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4519 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4520 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4521 builds.
4522
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004523- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4524 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4525 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4526 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4527 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4528 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4529 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4530 new type.
4531
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004532- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004533
4534 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4535 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4536 positive infinities.
4537
4538 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4539 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4540 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4541 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4542 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4543 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4544 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4545
4546 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4547
4548 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4549
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004550- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4551 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4552 size of the executable.
4553
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004554- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4555 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4556 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4557 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004558
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004559- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4560
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004561- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4562 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4563 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004564
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004565- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4566 well as Unix.
4567
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004568- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4569 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4570 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4571 modules in the README file for details.
4572
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004573C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004574-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004575
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004576- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4577 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004578 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004579 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004580 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004581
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004582- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4583 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4584 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4585 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4586 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4587 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004588 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004589 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4590 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4591 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4592 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4593 aligned.)
4594
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004595- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4596 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4597 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4598
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004599- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4600 level.
4601
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004602- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4603 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4604 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4605 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4606 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4607
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004608- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4609 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4610 code.
4611
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004612- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4613 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4614 adjusting for negative indices.
4615
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004616- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4617 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4618 object.
4619
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004620- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4621 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4622 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4623
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004624- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4625 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004626
4627- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4628
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004629- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4630 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4631 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4632 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4633
4634- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4635
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004636- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004637
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004638- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004639 without going through the buffer API.
4640
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004641- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004642
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004643- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4644 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4645 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4646 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4647
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004648- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4649 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4650
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004651- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004652 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4653
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004654New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004655-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004656
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004657- OpenVMS is now supported.
4658
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004659- AtheOS is now supported.
4660
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004661- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4662
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004663- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4664
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004665Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004666-----
4667
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004668- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4669 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4670 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004671
4672Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004673-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004674
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004675- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4676 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4677 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4678 bugs.
4679 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004680 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004681 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4682 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004683 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004684
4685- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004686 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004687
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004688- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4689 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4690
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004691- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4692 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004693 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004694 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4695
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004696- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4697 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4698 use files" uninstall option).
4699
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004700- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4701
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004702- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4703 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4704
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004705- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4706 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4707 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4708
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004709- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4710 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4711 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4712 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4713 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004714 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4715 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4716 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004717
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004718- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004719 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004720 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4721 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4722 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4723 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4724 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4725 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4726 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4727 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4728 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4729 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4730 work around.
4731
4732- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4733 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4734 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4735 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4736 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4737 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4738 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4739 specified with O_CREAT too).
4740
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004741Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004742----
4743
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004744- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004745
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004746- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4747 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4748 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4749
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004750- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4751 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4752 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4753
4754- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4755 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4756 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4757 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4758 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4759 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4760 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4761 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004762
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004763- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4764 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4765 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004766
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004767- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4768 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4769 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4770 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4771 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004772
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004773- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4774 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4775 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004776
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004777- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4778 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004779
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004780- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4781 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4782 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4783 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4784 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004785
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004786- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4787 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4788 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4789
4790- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4791 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4792 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004793
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004794- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4795 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4796 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4797 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004798 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004799
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004800- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4801 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004802
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004803- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4804 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004805
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004806- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004807 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004808 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4809 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004810
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004811
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004812What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004813===============================
4814
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004815*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4816
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004817Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004818--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004819
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004820- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4821 with a custom metaclass.
4822
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004823Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004824-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004825
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004826- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4827 are proxies.
4828
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004829Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004830-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004831
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004832- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4833 very short strings.
4834
4835- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4836 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4837 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4838 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4839 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4840
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004841Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004842-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004843
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004844- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4845 close or delete time).
4846
4847- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4848 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4849
4850- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4851
4852- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004853 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004854
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004855Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004856-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004857
4858Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004859-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004860
4861C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004862-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004863
4864New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004865-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004866
4867Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004868-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004869
4870Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004871-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004872
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004873- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4874
4875- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4876 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4877
4878- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4879 deleted at process exit time.
4880
4881- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4882 in backslash.
4883
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004884Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004885----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004886
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004887- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4888 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4889 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4890
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004891
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004892What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004893===========================
4894
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004895*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4896
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004897Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004898--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004899
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004900- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4901 been extensively updated. See
4902
4903 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4904
4905 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4906
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004907- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4908 deleted!
4909
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004910- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4911 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4912 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4913 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4914 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4915
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004916- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4917
4918 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4919 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4920
4921 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4922 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4923 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4924 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4925 supported anyway.
4926
4927 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4928 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4929
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004930- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4931 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4932 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4933 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4934 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004935
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004936- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4937 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4938 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4939
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004940Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004941-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004942
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004943- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4944 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4945 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4946 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4947 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4948 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004949 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4950 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4951 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4952 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004953
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004954- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4955 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4956 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4957
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004958Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004959-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004960
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004961- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4962
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004963Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004964-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004965
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004966- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4967 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4968 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4969 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4970 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4971 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4972
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004973- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4974
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004975- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4976
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004977- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4978
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004979- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4980 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4981 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4982
4983- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4984
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004985Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004986-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004987
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004988- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4989 off a search on Google.
4990
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004991Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004992-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004993
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004994- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4995 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4996 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4997 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4998 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4999 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
5000 other platforms should do likewise.
5001
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00005002- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
5003 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
5004 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
5005
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005006C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005007-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005008
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00005009- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
5010 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
5011 producing key-value pairs.
5012
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00005013- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00005014 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00005015 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
5016 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
5017 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
5018 previously went unchallenged.
5019
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005020New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005021-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005022
5023Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005024-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005025
5026Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005027-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005028
5029Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005030----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005031
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00005032- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
5033 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005034
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00005035- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
5036 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
5037 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
5038 home.
5039
5040
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005041What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005042===========================
5043
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005044*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
5045
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005046Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005047--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005048
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00005049- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
5050 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00005051
5052 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00005053 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00005054
5055 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
5056 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005057 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00005058 This needs to be documented.
5059
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00005060- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
5061 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
5062
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00005063- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
5064 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
5065 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
5066
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00005067- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
5068 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
5069
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005070- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
5071 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
5072 class forbids it).
5073
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00005074- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
5075 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
5076 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
5077
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005078- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
5079
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005080Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005081-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005082
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00005083- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
5084 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005085 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00005086
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005087- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
5088 (like 1 + '').
5089
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005090Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005091-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005092
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005093- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
5094 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
5095 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
5096 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005097 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005098 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
5099
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00005100- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
5101 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
5102 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
5103 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
5104
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005105- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
5106 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005107 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
5108 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
5109 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005110
5111- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
5112 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005113
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00005114- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
5115 bytes on its input.
5116
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005117Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005118-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005119
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005120- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00005121 convenience function.
5122
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005123- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
5124 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
5125 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005126 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
5127 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
5128 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
5129 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
5130 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
5131 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005132
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00005133- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
5134 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
5135 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
5136 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
5137
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00005138- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
5139 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
5140 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
5141
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005142- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
5143 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
5144 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
5145 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
5146
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005147- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
5148 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005149 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005150 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
5151 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
5152 new -l and -e options.
5153
5154- statcache is now deprecated.
5155
5156- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
5157 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005158 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005159 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
5160 time properly taken into account.
5161
5162- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
5163 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
5164 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
5165 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
5166
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005167Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005168-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005169
5170Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005171-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005172
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005173- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
5174 is built with libdb3 if available.
5175
5176- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
5177
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005178C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005179-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005180
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00005181- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
5182 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
5183 PySequence_Size().
5184
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005185- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
5186
5187- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
5188 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
5189 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
5190
5191- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
5192 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
5193
5194- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
5195 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
5196
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005197New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005198-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005199
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005200- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
5201 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
5202
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00005203- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
5204 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
5205
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005206- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
5207
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005208Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005209-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005210
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005211- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
5212 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
5213
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005214Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005215-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005216
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005217Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005218----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005219
5220- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
5221 removed completely in the next release.
5222
5223- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
5224 OSX.
5225
5226- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
5227 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
5228
5229- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
5230
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005231
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005232What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005233===========================
5234
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005235*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5236
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005237Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005238--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005239
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005240- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005241 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005242 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005243 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5244 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005245 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5246 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005247 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5248 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005249
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005250- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5251 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5252
5253- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5254 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5255
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005256Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005257-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005258
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005259- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5260 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5261 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5262 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5263 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5264 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5265 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5266 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5267
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005268- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5269 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5270 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5271 example).
5272
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005273- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005274 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005275 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005276 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005277
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005278- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5279 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5280 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005281 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005282
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005283- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5284 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5285 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5286 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5287 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5288 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5289
5290 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5291
5292 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5293
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005294Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005295-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005296
5297- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5298
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005299- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5300
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005301- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5302 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005303
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005304- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5305 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5306 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5307 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5308 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5309 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005310 attributes.
5311
5312- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5313 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5314 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005315
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005316- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5317 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5318 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005319
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005320- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5321 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5322 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005323 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5324 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5325
5326- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5327 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005328
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005329Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005330-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005331
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005332- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5333 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5334
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005335- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5336 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5337 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5338 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5339
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005340- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5341 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5342 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5343 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5344
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005345 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5346 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5347 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5348 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5349 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5350 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5351 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5352 without losing information).
5353
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005354- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005355 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5356 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5357 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5358 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5359 module).
5360
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005361 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005362 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5363 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5364 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5365 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005366
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005367- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005368 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5369 encoding.
5370
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005371- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5372 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5373
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005374- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005375 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5376
5377- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5378 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5379 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5380 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5381
5382- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5383
5384- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5385 ON, and OFF.
5386
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005387- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5388 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5389
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005390Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005391-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005392
5393- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5394 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5395 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005396
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005397- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5398 been added: -X and -E.
5399
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005400Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005401-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005402
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005403- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5404 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5405
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005406C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005407-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005408
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005409- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5410 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5411 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5412 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5413 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5414
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005415- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5416 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5417 as long) arguments.
5418
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005419- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5420 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5421 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5422 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5423 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5424 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5425
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005426- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5427 input.
5428
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005429New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005430-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005431
5432Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005433-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005434
5435Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005436-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005437
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005438- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5439 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5440 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5441
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005442- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5443 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5444 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005445 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005446
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005447 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5448 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5449 import signal
5450 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005451
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005452 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005453 while 1:
5454 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005455 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005456 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5457 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5458 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5459 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005460
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005461
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005462What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5463===========================
5464
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005465*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5466
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005467Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005468--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005469
5470- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5471 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5472 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5473
5474- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5475 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5476 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5477 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5478 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5479 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5480 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005481
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005482- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005483 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005484 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5485 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5486 associate a docstring with a property.
5487
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005488- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5489 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5490 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5491 other built-in object types.
5492
5493- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5494 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5495 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5496 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5497 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5498
5499- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5500 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5501
5502- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5503 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005504 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005505 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5506 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5507 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5508 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5509 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5510
5511- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5512 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5513 class.
5514
5515- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5516 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5517 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5518 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5519
5520- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5521 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5522 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5523 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5524
5525- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5526 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5527
5528- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5529 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5530 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5531 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5532 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005533 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005534 with the same value as s.
5535
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005536- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5537
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005538Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005539----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005540
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005541- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5542
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005543- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5544 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5545 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5546 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5547 objects.
5548
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005549- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5550 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005551 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5552 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5553
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005554- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5555 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5556 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5557
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005558Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005559-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005560
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005561- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5562 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5563 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5564 by the instances.
5565
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005566- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5567 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5568 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5569
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005570- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5571 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5572 before the entire comparison is complete.
5573
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005574- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5575 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5576 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5577
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005578- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5579 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5580 getwriter().
5581
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005582- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5583 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5584
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005585- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005586 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5587 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5588
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005589- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5590 iterable object.
5591
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005592- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5593 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005594
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005595- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5596 authentication.
5597
5598- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5599 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005600
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005601- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005602 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5603 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5604 a sample driver.)
5605
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005606Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005607-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005608
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005609- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5610 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5611 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5612 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5613 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5614 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5615 kernel has large file support.
5616
5617- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5618 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5619 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5620 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5621 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5622
5623- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5624 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5625 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5626
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005627C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005628-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005629
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005630- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5631 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5632
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005633New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005634-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005635
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005636- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5637 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5638
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005639Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005640-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005641
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005642- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5643 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5644 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5645 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5646 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5647
5648- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5649 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5650 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5651 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5652
5653- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5654 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5655
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005656Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005657-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005658
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005659- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005660 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5661 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005662
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005663
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005664What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5665===========================
5666
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005667*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5668
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005669Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005670----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005671
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005672- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5673 big to represent as a C double.
5674
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005675- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5676 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5677 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5678 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5679 restriction).
5680
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005681- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5682 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5683 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5684 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5685 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5686
5687 >>> dir([])
5688 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5689 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5690 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5691 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5692 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5693 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5694 'reverse', 'sort']
5695
5696 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5697
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005698- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005699 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5700 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5701 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5702 OverflowError exception.
5703
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005704- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005705 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005706 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5707 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5708 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5709 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5710 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005711 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005712 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5713 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5714
5715 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5716 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5717 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5718 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005719
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005720- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005721 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5722 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5723 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5724 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5725 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5726 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5727 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5728 once it is created.
5729
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005730- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5731 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5732 (key, value) pairs.
5733
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005734- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005735 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5736 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5737
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005738- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5739 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5740 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5741 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5742 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005743
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005744- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005745 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5746 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5747
5748 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5749
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005750- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005751 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5752
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005753Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005754-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005755
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005756- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005757 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5758 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005759
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005760- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5761 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5762 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5763 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5764 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5765 in this area anymore).
5766
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005767- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5768 threading.Timer.
5769
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005770- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5771 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5772
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005773- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005774 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5775
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005776- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005777 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5778 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5779 converted to Python longs.
5780
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005781- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005782 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5783
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005784- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5785 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5786 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5787
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005788Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005789-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005790
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005791- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5792 division operators as per PEP 238.
5793
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005794Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005795-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005796
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005797- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5798 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5799 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5800 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5801
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005802C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005803-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005804
5805- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005806
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005807- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5808 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005809 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005810
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005811 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5812 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005813 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005814 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005815
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005816- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005817 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5818 module:
5819
5820 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005821
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005822 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5823 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005824
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005825 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5826 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005827
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005828 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5829
5830 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5831
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005832- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005833 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5834 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5835 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005836
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005837New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005838-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005839
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005840- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5841 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5842 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5843 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5844 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005845
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005846Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005847-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005848
5849Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005850-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005851
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005852- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5853 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5854 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5855 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005856 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5857 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5858 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5859 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5860 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005861
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005862- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005863 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5864
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005865
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005866What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5867===========================
5868
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005869*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5870
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005871Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005872-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005873
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005874- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5875 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5876
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005877- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5878 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5879 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005880
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005881- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5882 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5883 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5884 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005885
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005886- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5887
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005888- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005889
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005890Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005891-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005892
5893- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005894 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005895 the module docstring for details.
5896
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005897Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005898-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005899
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005900- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005901 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5902 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5903 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005904
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005905- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5906 Nick Mathewson.
5907
5908Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005909----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005910
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005911- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5912 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5913 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5914 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5915 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5916 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5917 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5918 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5919
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005920- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5921 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5922 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5923 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5924
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005925- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5926 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5927 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5928 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5929 come a long way).
5930
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005931- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5932 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5933 write filters for these warnings).
5934
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005935- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5936 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5937 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5938 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5939 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5940
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005941- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5942 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5943 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5944 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5945 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5946 older distribution.
5947
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005948Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005949-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005950
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005951- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5952 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005953 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005954
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005955- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5956 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5957 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5958
5959- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5960
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005961- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5962
5963- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5964
5965- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5966
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005967- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005968
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005969- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5970
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005971New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005972-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005973
5974C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005975-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005976
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005977- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5978 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5979 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5980 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5981 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5982 against buffer overruns.
5983
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005984- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005985 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5986 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005987 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5988 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5989 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5990
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005991- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5992 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5993 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5994 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5995 deprecated.
5996
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005997Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005998-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005999
6000- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
6001 relevant is found.
6002
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00006003
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00006004What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006005===========================
6006
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006007*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
6008
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006009Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006010----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006011
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00006012- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
6013 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
6014 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
6015 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
6016 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
6017 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
6018 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
6019 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006020 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00006021 repaired.
6022
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00006023- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00006024 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00006025 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
6026 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
6027 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
6028 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
6029 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
6030 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
6031 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
6032 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
6033
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00006034- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
6035 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
6036 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
6037 leading BMO character).
6038
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00006039- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
6040 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
6041 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
6042
6043 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
6044 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
6045 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006046
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00006047 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
6048 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
6049 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
6050 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
6051 for various simple to use conversions.
6052
6053 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
6054 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
6055
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006056 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6057 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
6058 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
6059 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
6060 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6061 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
6062 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6063 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
6064 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6065 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
6066 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6067 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
6068 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6069 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
6070 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00006071
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006072- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
6073 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
6074 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006075 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006076 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006077
6078 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006079 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
6080 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
6081 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
6082 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
6083 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006084 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
6085 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006086
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006087 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
6088 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
6089 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006090 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006091
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00006092- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
6093 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
6094 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
6095 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
6096 floating arithmetic,
6097
6098 x = 9007199254740992.0
6099 print long(x)
6100
6101 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
6102 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
6103 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
6104 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
6105 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
6106 functions are of good quality).
6107
6108 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
6109 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
6110 algorithms to break.
6111
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00006112- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
6113 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
6114 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
6115 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
6116 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
6117 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
6118 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
6119 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
6120 order.
6121
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006122- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
6123 operation along the most common code paths.
6124
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006125- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
6126 the same as dict.has_key(x).
6127
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00006128- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
6129 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
6130 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
6131 {}.update(UserDict())
6132
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006133- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
6134 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
6135 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
6136 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
6137 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
6138 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
6139 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
6140 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
6141
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006142- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00006143 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006144
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006145 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00006146 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
6147 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00006148 join() method of strings
6149 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006150 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
6151 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006152 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00006153 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006154
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00006155- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
6156 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
6157
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006158- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
6159 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
6160
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00006161- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
6162 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
6163 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
6164 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
6165
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006166- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
6167 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006168 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006169 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
6170 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00006171
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00006172- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
6173
6174
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006175Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006176-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006177
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006178- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006179 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006180 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
6181 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
6182
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00006183- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
6184 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
6185
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00006186- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
6187 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
6188 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
6189 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
6190
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00006191- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
6192 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
6193 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
6194
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00006195- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
6196
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00006197- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
6198
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00006199- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
6200 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
6201 that are still imported into string.py).
6202
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006203- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
6204
6205- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
6206 Now it does.
6207
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006208- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
6209
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006210- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
6211 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
6212 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
6213 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
6214 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006215 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
6216 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006217
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00006218- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
6219 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
6220 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
6221 'help(object)'.
6222
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006223Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006224-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006225
6226- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006227 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006228 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
6229 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
6230
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006231- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006232 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6233 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006234
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006235C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006236-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006237
6238- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6239 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006240
6241----
6242
6243**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**