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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +000015- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
16
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +000017- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
18 new documentation and modified profiler and bdb modules for more details
19
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +000020- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
21
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +000022- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
23
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +000024- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
25 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
26
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +000027- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
28 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
29 Fixes bug #858016 .
30
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +000031- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
32 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
33 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
34
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +000035- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
36 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
37 improves their performance (about 35%).
38
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +000039- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
40 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
41 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
42
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +000043- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
44 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
45 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
46 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
47
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000048- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
49 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
50 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
51 length is not known).
52
53- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
54 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +000055 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
56 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000057 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
58
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +000059- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
60 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
61
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +000062- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
63 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
64 keyword arguments.
65
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +000066- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
67 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
68 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
69
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +000070- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
71 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
72 cases.
73
74- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
75 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
76 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
77 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
78 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
79 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
80 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
81 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
82 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
83 a release build.
84
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +000085- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
86 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
87
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000088- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +000089 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000090
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +000091- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
92 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
93 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
94 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
95 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
96 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
97 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
98 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
99 destroyed.
100
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000101- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
102 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
103 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
104 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
105 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
106 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
107 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
108 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
109
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000110- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
111 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
112 character other than a space.
113
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000114- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
115 by the function object or by the method object, the function
116 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
117 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
118 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
119 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
120 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
121 attributes with the same name.
122
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000123- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
124 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
125 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
126 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
127 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
128 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
129 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
130 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
131 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
132 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
133 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
134 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
135 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
136 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000137
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000138- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
139 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
140 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
141 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
142 This has been repaired.
143
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000144- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
145
146- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
147
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000148- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
149 over a sequence.
150
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000151- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
152 from any iterable.
153
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000154- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
155
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000156- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
157 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
158 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
159 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
160 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
161 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
162 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
163 records with equal keys is unchanged).
164
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000165- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
166 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
167 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
168
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000169- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
170 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
171 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
172 freelist.
173
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000174- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
175 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
176
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000177- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
178 number.
179
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000180- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
181 a TypeError exception.
182
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000183- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
184 820195.
185
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000186- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
187 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
188 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
189
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000190- str and unicode builtin types now have rsplit() method that is
191 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
192 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000193
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000194- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
195 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
196 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
197
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000198- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
199 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
200 method is called as necessary.
201
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000202- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
203 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
204 the first call.
205
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000206
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000207Extension modules
208-----------------
209
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000210- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
211 fewer false positives.
212
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000213- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
214 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
215
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000216- Bug #920575: A problem that _locale module segfaults on
217 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
218
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000219- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
220 scheme has been updated the same as for list objects. The improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000221 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
222 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
223 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000224
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000225- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
226 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
227 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
228 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
229
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000230- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
231 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
232 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
233 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
234 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
235 #897625.
236
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000237- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
238 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
239
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000240- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
241 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
242 and pops on either side of the deque.
243
244- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
245 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
246
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000247- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
248 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
249 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
250 other functions that expect a function argument.
251
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000252- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
253
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000254- os.getsid was added.
255
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000256- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
257 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
258 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
259
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000260- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
261
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000262- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
263
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000264- readline.clear_history was added.
265
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000266- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
267
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000268- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
269
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000270- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
271
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000272- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
273
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000274- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
275
276- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
277
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000278- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
279
280- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
281
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000282- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
283 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
284 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
285
286- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
287 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
288 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
289 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
290 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
291 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
292 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
293
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000294- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
295 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
296 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
297 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000298
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000299- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
300 iterators from a single iterable.
301
302- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
303 of raising a TypeError exception.
304
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000305- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
306 as parameter.
307
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000308Library
309-------
310
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000311- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
312
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000313- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
314
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000315- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
316 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
317
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000318- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
319 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
320 type pattern with the same value exists.
321
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000322- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
323 when run from the command prompt).
324
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000325- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
326 not taken into consideration when caching value.
327
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000328- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
329 default sort).
330
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000331- Added global runctx function to profile module
332
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000333- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
334
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000335- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
336
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000337- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
338
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000339- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
340 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
341 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
342 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
343 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
344 accordingly.
345
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000346- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
347 decoding standards.
348
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000349- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
350 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
351 called for all requests.
352
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000353- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
354 they are passed to the compiler.
355
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000356- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
357 indent, width and depth.
358
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000359- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
360 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
361
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000362- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
363 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
364
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000365- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
366
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000367- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
368
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000369- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
370
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000371- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
372 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
373
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000374- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
375 for better performance
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000376
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000377- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
378 a string).
379
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000380- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
381
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000382- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
383
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000384- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
385
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000386- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
387
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000388- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
389 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
390 list of fieldnames.
391
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000392- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
393 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
394
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000395- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
396
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000397- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
398 empty lists.
399
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000400- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
401 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
402 and shelves.
403
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000404- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
405 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
406
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000407- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000408 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
409 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000410
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000411- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
412 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000413 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000414
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000415- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000416 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
417 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
418
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000419- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
420 and removed in Py2.4.
421
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000422- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
423
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000424- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
425
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000426Tools/Demos
427-----------
428
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000429- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
430 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
431
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000432- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
433
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000434- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
435 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
436 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
437 destination in situations where both files are given.
438
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000439- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
440 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
441 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
442 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
443
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000444- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
445
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000446- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
447 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
448 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
449 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
450 now.
451
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000452- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
453 in effect
454
455- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
456 C-c C-h
457
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000458- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
459 -d option was given.
460
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000461Build
462-----
463
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000464- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
465 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
466
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000467- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
468 removed.
469
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000470- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
471 supported (see PEP 11).
472
473- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
474
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000475- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
476
477- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
478 (see PEP 11).
479
480- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
481 sizeof(char) must be 1.
482
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000483C API
484-----
485
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000486- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
487 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000488 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
489 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000490
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000491- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
492 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
493
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000494- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
495 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
496 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
497 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
498 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
499
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000500- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
501 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
502 about 10% faster.
503
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000504- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
505 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
506
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000507- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
508 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
509 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
510 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
511
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000512New platforms
513-------------
514
515Tests
516-----
517
518Windows
519-------
520
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000521- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
522 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
523 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
524 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
525
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000526- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
527 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
528 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
529
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000530Mac
531----
532
533
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000534What's New in Python 2.3 final?
535===============================
536
537*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
538
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000539IDLE
540----
541
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000542- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
543 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
544 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
545 context-menu actions.
546
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000547- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
548 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
549 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
550 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
551 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
552 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
553 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
554 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
555 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
556
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000557
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000558What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
559=============================================
560
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000561*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000562
563Core and builtins
564-----------------
565
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000566- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000567 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000568 comment at the end are still unsupported.
569
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000570Extension modules
571-----------------
572
573- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
574 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
575 than once. This has been fixed.
576
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000577- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
578 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
579 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
580 call.
581
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000582- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
583
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000584Library
585-------
586
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000587- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
588 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
589
590- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
591 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
592 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
593 restored.
594
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000595IDLE
596----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000597
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000598- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000599
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000600Build
601-----
602
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000603- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
604 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
605
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000606C API
607-----
608
609Windows
610-------
611
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000612- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
613 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
614
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000615- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
616
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000617Mac
618---
619
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000620- Various fixes to pimp.
621
622- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
623
624- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
625 more problems than it solves.
626
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000627
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000628What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
629=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000630
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000631*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
632
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000633Core and builtins
634-----------------
635
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000636- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
637 by sys.setcheckinterval().
638
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000639- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
640 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000641 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000642
643- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
644 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
645 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000646 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000647
648- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
649 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000650
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000651- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
652 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
653 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
654
655- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000656 770247.
657
658- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000659
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000660Extension modules
661-----------------
662
663- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
664 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
665
666- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
667
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000668- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
669
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000670- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
671 contained within the _strptime module.
672
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000673- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
674 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
675
676- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000677 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
678
679- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
680 the find_class attribute, if present.
681
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000682- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000683
684 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
685 (SF bug 763298).
686
687 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000688 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
689 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
690 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000691
692 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
693
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000694Library
695-------
696
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000697- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
698
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000699- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
700 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
701 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
702 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
703 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
704 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
705 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
706 or Tester().
707
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000708- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
709 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
710 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
711 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
712 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
713 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
714 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
715 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
716 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000717
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000718 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000719
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000720- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
721 weren't before was an oversight.
722
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000723- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
724 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
725
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000726- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
727 when there are no lines.
728
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000729- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
730 which could occur with Tk 8.4
731
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000732- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
733 to child processes.
734
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000735- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
736
737- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
738
739- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
740 xmlrpclib.
741
742- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
743 responses.
744
745- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
746 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
747
748- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
749 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
750 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
751
752- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
753 used as patterns.
754
755- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
756 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
757 than Tk 8.3.
758
759- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
760
761- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000762
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000763Tools/Demos
764-----------
765
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000766- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
767
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000768- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
769
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000770- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000771
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000772Build
773-----
774
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000775- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
776
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000777- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
778
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000779- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
780 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000781
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000782- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
783 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
784 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000785
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000786C API
787-----
788
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000789- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
790 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
791
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000792Windows
793-------
794
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000795- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
796 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
797 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
798 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
799 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
800 Python exception ::
801
802 thread.error: can't start new thread
803
804 is raised now.
805
806- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
807 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
808 instead of from DLL teardown.
809
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000810Mac
811---
812
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000813- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000814 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000815 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
816 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
817 the executable in the bundle.
818
819- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000820
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000821- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
822
823- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
824 on Panther.
825
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000826What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
827================================
828
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000829*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000830
831Core and builtins
832-----------------
833
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000834- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
835 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
836 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
837 with the -i option.
838
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000839- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
840 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
841
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000842- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
843 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
844
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000845- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
846 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
847 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
848 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
849 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
850 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
851 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
852 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
853 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
854 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
855 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
856 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
857 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000858
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000859- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
860 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
861 embedded in a lambda expression.
862
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000863- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
864 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
865 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
866 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
867 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
868
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000869- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
870 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
871 matches the restriction on classic classes.
872
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000873- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
874 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
875
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000876- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
877 It's writable again.
878
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000879- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
880 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
881 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000882 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000883
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000884- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
885 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
886 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
887
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000888Extension modules
889-----------------
890
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000891- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
892 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
893
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000894- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
895 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
896 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
897 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
898
899- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
900 collection.
901
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000902- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
903 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
904 unique within a single program run.
905
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000906- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
907 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
908
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000909- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
910 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
911
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000912- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
913 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000914
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000915- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
916
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000917- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
918 Fixes SF bug #730685.
919
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000920- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
921 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
922 for many BSD-derived systems.
923
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000924
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000925Library
926-------
927
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000928- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
929 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
930 primary ones:
931
932 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
933 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
934 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
935
936 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
937 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
938 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
939 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
940 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
941 framework features (which doctest lacks).
942
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000943- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
944 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
945 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
946 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
947 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
948 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
949 argument.
950
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000951- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
952 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
953 in the archive.
954
955- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
956 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
957
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000958- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
959 569574).
960
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000961- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
962 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
963 no more.
964
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000965- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
966 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
967 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
968 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
969 code coverage.
970
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000971- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
972 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
973 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000974 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
975 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000976
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000977- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
978 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
979 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000980 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000981
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000982- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
983
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000984- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
985 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
986 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
987 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
988
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000989- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
990 handling.
991
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000992- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
993 __doc__ of data descriptors.
994
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000995- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
996 in socket.py.
997
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000998- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
999
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001000- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1001 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1002 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1003 opener with proxy support.
1004
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001005- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1006
1007- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1008
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001009Tools/Demos
1010-----------
1011
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001012- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1013
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001014- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1015
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001016- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1017 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001018
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001019- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1020 files.
1021
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001022Build
1023-----
1024
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001025- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001026 different root directory.
1027
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001028C API
1029-----
1030
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001031- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1032 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1033 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1034 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1035 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1036 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1037 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1038 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1039 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1040 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1041
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001042- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1043 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1044 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1045 from Python.
1046
1047
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001048New platforms
1049-------------
1050
1051None this time.
1052
1053Tests
1054-----
1055
1056- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1057 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1058
1059Windows
1060-------
1061
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001062- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1063
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001064- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1065 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1066 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1067 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1068 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1069 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1070 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1071 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1072 that's what it's for.
1073
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001074Mac
1075---
1076
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001077- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1078 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1079 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1080 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001081- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1082 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1083- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001084
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001085SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1086------------------------------------
1087
1088430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1089598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1090622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1091661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1092683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1093697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1094713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1095724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1096727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1097729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1098730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1099731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1100732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1101733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1102735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1103740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1104744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1105745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1106747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1107749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1108751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1109753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1110755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1111757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1112760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1113
1114
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001115What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1116================================
1117
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001118*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001119
1120Core and builtins
1121-----------------
1122
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001123- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1124 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1125
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001126- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1127 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1128 and cannot be strings).
1129
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001130- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1131 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1132 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1133 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1134
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001135- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1136 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1137 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1138 Python itself.
1139
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001140- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1141 the referenced object, if it has one.
1142
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001143- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1144 the thread started at
1145 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1146
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001147- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1148 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1149 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1150 placed on a list index.
1151
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001152- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1153 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1154 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1155 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1156
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001157- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1158 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1159 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1160 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1161 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1162 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1163 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1164
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001165- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1166 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1167 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1168 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1169 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1170
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001171- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1172 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001173
1174- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1175 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1176 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1177 #693195.)
1178
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001179- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1180 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001181
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001182- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001183 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001184 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1185 interpreter executions, would fail.
1186
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001187- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001188 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001189 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001190
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001191Extension modules
1192-----------------
1193
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001194- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1195 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1196 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1197 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1198
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001199- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1200 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1201
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001202- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1203 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1204 and Greg Chapman.)
1205
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001206- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1207 recursively.
1208
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001209- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001210 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1211 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1212 leaks.
1213
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001214- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1215
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001216- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1217 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1218 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1219 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1220 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1221 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1222 #705836.
1223
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001224- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001225 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1226
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001227- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1228 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1229 See SF bug #692416.
1230
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001231- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1232 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1233
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001234- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1235 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1236 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001237
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001238- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001239 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1240 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1241
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001242- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1243 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1244 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1245 timeouts to work properly.
1246
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001247Library
1248-------
1249
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001250- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1251 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1252 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1253 future release.
1254
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001255- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1256 for querying platform dependent features.
1257
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001258- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001259
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001260- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1261 pickle protocol versions.
1262
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001263- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1264 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1265 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1266
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001267- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1268
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001269- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1270 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1271 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1272 modules.
1273
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001274- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1275 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1276 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1277
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001278- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1279 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1280
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001281- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1282 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1283 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1284
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001285- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001286 MS Office extensions.
1287
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001288- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1289 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1290
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001291- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1292 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1293
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001294- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1295 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1296 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1297 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1298 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1299 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1300
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001301- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1302 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1303 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001304
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001305- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1306 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1307 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1308
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001309- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1310
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001311- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1312 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1313 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1314
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001315Tools/Demos
1316-----------
1317
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001318- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1319 See the module docstring for details.
1320
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001321Build
1322-----
1323
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001324- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1325 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001326
1327C API
1328-----
1329
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001330- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1331
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001332- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1333 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1334 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1335
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001336- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1337 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001338
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001339 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1340 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1341 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001342
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001343- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001344 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1345
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001346- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1347 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1348 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001349
1350New platforms
1351-------------
1352
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001353None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001354
1355Tests
1356-----
1357
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001358- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1359 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001360
1361Windows
1362-------
1363
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001364- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1365 function.
1366
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001367- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1368 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001369
1370Mac
1371---
1372
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001373- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1374 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001375
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001376- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1377 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001378
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001379- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1380 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1381 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001382
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001383- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001384 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1385 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001386
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001387- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1388 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001389
1390
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001391What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1392=================================
1393
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001394*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001395
1396Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001397-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001398
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001399- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1400 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1401 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1402
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001403- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1404 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1405 (SF patch #664376.)
1406
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001407- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1408 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1409 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1410 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1411 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1412 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001413 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001414
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001415- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1416 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1417 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1418 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001419 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001420
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001421- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1422 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1423 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1424 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1425 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1426 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1427 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1428 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1429 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1430 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1431 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1432
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001433- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1434 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1435 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1436 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1437 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1438 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1439
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001440- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1441 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1442
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001443- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1444 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1445 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1446 case.)
1447
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001448- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1449 passed as unicode strings.
1450
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001451- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1452 See SF bug #683467.
1453
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001454- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1455 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1456
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001457- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1458
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001459- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1460
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001461- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1462 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1463 arguments.
1464
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001465- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1466 See SF bug #667147.
1467
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001468- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001469 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001470 See SF bug #676155.
1471
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001472- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001473 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001474 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1475 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1476 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1477 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1478 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1479 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001480
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001481Extension modules
1482-----------------
1483
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001484- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1485 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1486 tp_as_number pointer.
1487
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001488- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1489 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1490 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1491 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1492 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1493
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001494- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1495
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001496- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1497
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001498- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001499 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001500 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1501 patch #678531.)
1502
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001503- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1504 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1505
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001506- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1507 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1508
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001509- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1510
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001511- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1512 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1513 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1514
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001515- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1516
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001517- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1518 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1519
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001520- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001521
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001522- datetime changes:
1523
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001524 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1525
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001526 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1527 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1528 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1529 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1530 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1531 now.
1532
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001533 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001534 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1535 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001536
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001537 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001538 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001539 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1540 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1541 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1542 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001543
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001544 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1545 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1546 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001547 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1548
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001549 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1550 by a later example coded by Guido.
1551
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001552 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001553 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1554 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1555 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001556 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1557 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1558
1559 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1560 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1561 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1562 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1563 tzinfo subclass instance.
1564
1565 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1566 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1567 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1568 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1569 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1570 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1571 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1572 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001573
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001574 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1575 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1576 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1577 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1578 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001579 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1580
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001581 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001582
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001583 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1584 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1585 as a naive datetime object.
1586
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001587 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1588 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1589 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1590
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001591 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1592 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1593 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1594 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1595 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1596 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1597 comparison.
1598
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001599 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1600 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1601 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1602 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001603 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001604
1605 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001606
1607 and ::
1608
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001609 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1610
1611 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1612 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1613 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1614 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1615
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001616 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1617 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1618 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1619 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1620 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1621
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001622 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1623 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001624 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1625 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001626
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001627Library
1628-------
1629
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001630- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1631 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1632
1633- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1634 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1635 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1636 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1637 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1638 See PEP 307 for details.
1639
1640- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1641 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1642
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001643- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1644 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001645 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001646 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1647 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001648 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001649
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001650- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1651 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1652
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001653- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1654 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1655 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1656
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001657- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1658
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001659- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1660 exception.
1661
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001662- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1663 class.
1664
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001665- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1666 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1667 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1668
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001669- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1670 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1671
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001672- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001673 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1674 See SF bug #659228.
1675
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001676- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1677 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1678 See SF patch #651082.
1679
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001680- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001681
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001682- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1683 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1684
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001685- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001686 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001687
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001688- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1689 DOS paths from other platforms.
1690
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001691Tools/Demos
1692-----------
1693
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001694- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1695 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1696 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1697 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1698 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1699 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1700 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1701 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1702 example:
1703
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001704 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1705 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001706
1707 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1708
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001709
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001710Build
1711-----
1712
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001713- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1714 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1715 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001716 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1717
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001718 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1719
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001720- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1721 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1722 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1723 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1724 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1725 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1726 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1727 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1728 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1729
1730- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1731 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1732 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1733 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1734
1735- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1736 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1737
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001738C API
1739-----
1740
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001741- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1742 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001743
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001744- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1745 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1746 tp_as_number pointer.
1747
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001748- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1749 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1750 (SF #681367)
1751
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001752- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1753 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1754 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1755 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001756
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001757Tests
1758-----
1759
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001760- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001761 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1762 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1763 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1764 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1765 pydoc.)
1766
1767- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1768
1769- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001770
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001771Windows
1772-------
1773
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001774- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1775 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1776 time).
1777
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001778- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1779 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1780
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001781- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1782 release without strong cryptography.
1783
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001784- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001785 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001786
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001787- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1788 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1789
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001790Mac
1791---
1792
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001793- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1794 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001795
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001796- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1797 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1798 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001799
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001800- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1801 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001802
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001803- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1804 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1805 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1806 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001807
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001808- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001809 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1810 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1811 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001812
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001813
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001814What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001815=================================
1816
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001817*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001818
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001819Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001820--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001821
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001822- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1823
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001824- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1825 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001826 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001827 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001828 a different meaning than before.
1829
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001830- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001831 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001832 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001833
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001834- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001835 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001836 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001837
1838- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1839 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1840 and deallocation.
1841
1842- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1843 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1844
1845- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1846 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1847 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1848 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1849 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1850
1851- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1852 now detected by the garbage collector.
1853
1854- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1855 [SF bug 519621]
1856
1857- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1858 identifier.
1859
1860- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1861 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1862 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1863 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1864 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1865 [SF bug 563060]
1866
1867- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1868 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1869 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1870 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1871 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1872
1873- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1874 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1875 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1876
1877- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1878
1879- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1880 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1881 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1882 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1883 state of the slots would be lost.)
1884
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001885Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001886-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001887
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001888- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001889 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1890 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1891 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1892 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001893 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1894 Jython 2.1.
1895
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001896- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001897 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001898 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1899 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1900 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1901 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1902 these, see PEP 302.
1903
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001904- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1905 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1906 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1907
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001908- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1909 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1910 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1911
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001912- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1913 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1914 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1915
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001916- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1917 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1918 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1919 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1920 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1921 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1922 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1923 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1924 releases or implementations.
1925
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001926- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001927 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1928 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001929
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001930- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1931 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1932
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001933- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1934 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1935 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1936
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001937- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1938 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1939
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001940- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1941 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001942 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1943 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001944
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001945- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1946 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1947 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1948 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1949 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1950
1951 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1952 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1953 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1954 pattern.
1955
1956 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1957 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1958 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1959 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1960
1961 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1962 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1963 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1964 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1965 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1966 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1967
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001968- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1969 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1970 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1971 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1972 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1973 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1974 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1975 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001976
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001977- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1978 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1979 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1980 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1981 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001982 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1983 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1984 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1985 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1986 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1987 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1988 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001989
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001990- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1991 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1992
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001993- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1994 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1995 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1996 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1997 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1998 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1999 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2000 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2001 to Zack Weinberg!
2002
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002003- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2004 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2005 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2006 type. This has been fixed now.
2007
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002008- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2009 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2010 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2011
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002012- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2013 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2014 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2015 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2016 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2017 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2018 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2019 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002020 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002021
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002022- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2023 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2024 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002025
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002026- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2027 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2028 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2029 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2030 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2031 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2032 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2033 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002034 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002035 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2036 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2037
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002038- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2039 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2040 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2041 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2042 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2043 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2044 this.)
2045
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002046- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2047 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002048 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002049 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002050 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2051 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002052 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2053 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002054
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002055- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2056 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2057 currently running.
2058
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002059- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2060 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2061 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2062 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2063
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002064- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2065 as directory names.
2066
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002067- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2068 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2069
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002070- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2071 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2072
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002073- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002074 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2075 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002076
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002077- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2078 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2079 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2080 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2081 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2082
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002083- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2084 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2085 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2086 removed.
2087
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002088- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2089 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2090 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2091
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002092- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2093 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2094 to __debug__.
2095
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002096- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2097 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2098 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2099
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002100- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2101 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2102 deprecated now.
2103
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002104- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2105 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2106 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002107
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002108- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2109 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2110 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2111 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2112 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002113
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002114- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2115 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2116
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002117- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2118 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2119 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002120 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002121 is backward compatible.
2122
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002123- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2124 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2125 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2126 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2127 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2128
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002129- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2130 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2131 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2132 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2133 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2134 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002135
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002136- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2137 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2138
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002139- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2140 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2141
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002142- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2143 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2144 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2145 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2146 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2147
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002148- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2149 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2150 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2151
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002152- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002153 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2154
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002155- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2156 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2157 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002158
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002159- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2160 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2161
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002162- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2163 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2164 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2165
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002166- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2167
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002168Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002169-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002170
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002171- Added three operators to the operator module:
2172 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2173 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2174 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2175
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002176- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2177
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002178- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2179 archives.
2180
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002181- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2182 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2183 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2184
2185 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2186
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002187- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2188 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2189 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002190 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002191
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002192- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2193 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2194 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2195 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002196 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2197 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2198 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2199 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002200
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002201- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2202 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002203
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002204- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2205
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002206- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2207 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2208
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002209- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2210 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2211 supported.
2212
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002213- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2214
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002215- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2216 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002217
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002218- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2219 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2220
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002221- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2222
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002223- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2224 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2225
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002226- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2227 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2228 functions but callable type objects.
2229
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002230- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002231 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002232 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002233
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002234- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2235 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002236
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002237- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2238 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002239
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002240- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2241 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2242 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2243 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2244
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002245- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2246 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002247
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002248- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2249 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2250 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2251 and __imul__.
2252
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002253- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002254 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2255 is called.
2256
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002257- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2258 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2259 interpreter was compiled.
2260
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002261- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2262 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2263 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002264 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002265 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2266 1, not 2.
2267
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002268- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2269 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2270 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2271 limit.
2272
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002273- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2274 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2275 bug #623464.
2276
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002277- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2278 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2279 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2280 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2281
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002282Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002283-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002284
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002285- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2286
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002287- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2288 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2289 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2290 with Python 2.3a2.
2291
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002292- os.path exposes getctime.
2293
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002294- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002295 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002296 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002297 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002298 unit tests of floating point results.
2299
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002300- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2301 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2302 has been increased.
2303
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002304- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2305 executed.
2306
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002307- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2308 postinstallation script.
2309
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002310- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2311 test the current module.
2312
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002313- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002314 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2315 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2316 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2317 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2318
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002319- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002320 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002321 Ward's Optik package.
2322
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002323- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2324 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2325 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2326 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2327
2328- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2329 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002330 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002331
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002332- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2333 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2334 shelf are binary pickles.
2335
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002336- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2337 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2338
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002339- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2340 modules are iterators now.
2341
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002342- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2343 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2344 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2345 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2346 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2347 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002348
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002349- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2350 with their entity value.
2351
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002352- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2353
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002354- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2355 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002356
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002357- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2358 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002359 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002360
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002361- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2362 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2363 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2364 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2365 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2366 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2367 main():
2368
2369 import locale
2370 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2371
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002372- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2373 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2374
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002375- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2376 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2377 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2378 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2379 to the new standard.
2380
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002381- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2382 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2383 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2384 an extension to the database.
2385
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002386- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2387 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2388 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2389 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002390 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002391
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002392- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002393 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002394
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002395- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2396 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2397 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2398 bounded integers.
2399
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002400- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2401 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2402 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2403 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2404 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2405 in existence.
2406
2407 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2408 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2409 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2410 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2411 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2412 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2413
2414 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2415 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2416 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2417 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2418
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002419- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2420 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2421 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2422
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002423- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2424
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002425- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2426 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2427 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2428 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2429
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002430- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2431 argument.
2432
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002433- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2434 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2435 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2436 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2437 [SF patch 560794].
2438
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002439- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2440 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2441 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002442 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2443 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2444 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002445
2446- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2447 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002448
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002449- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2450 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2451 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2452 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002453
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002454- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2455 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2456 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2457 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2458 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2459
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002460- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002461
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002462- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2463
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002464- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2465 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2466 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2467 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2468 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2469 identical to None.
2470
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002471- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2472 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2473 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2474 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2475 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2476 results now.
2477
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002478- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2479 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2480
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002481- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2482 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2483 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2484 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2485 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2486 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2487 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2488 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2489
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002490- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2491
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002492- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2493 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2494
2495- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2496 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2497 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2498 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2499 and other systems.
2500
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002501- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2502 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2503 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2504 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 +00002505 work well with these.
2506
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002507- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2508
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002509- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002510 connections.
2511
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002512- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2513 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2514 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2515
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002516- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2517 sets
2518
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002519- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2520 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2521 name.
2522
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002523- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2524 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2525 passed in.
2526
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002527- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002528 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002529 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2530 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002531
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002532- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2533
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002534- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2535
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002536- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2537 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2538 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2539
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002540- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2541 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2542 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2543 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002544 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002545
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002546- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002547 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002548 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002549
2550- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2551 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2552 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2553
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002554- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002555 the value of its expression argument.
2556
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002557- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2558 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2559 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2560
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002561- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2562 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2563 skipstone browser was included.
2564
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002565- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2566 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2567
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002568Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002569-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002570
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002571- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2572 names in addition to accepting file names.
2573
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002574- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2575 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2576 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2577 still used and useful.)
2578
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002579- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2580 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2581 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2582 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002583
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002584- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2585 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2586 the generated binary.
2587
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002588Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002589-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002590
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002591- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2592
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002593- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2594 except in the hands of experts.
2595
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002596- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002597 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2598 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2599 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002600
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002601- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2602 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2603 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2604 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2605 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2606 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2607 builds.
2608
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002609- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2610 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2611 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2612 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2613 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2614 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2615 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2616 new type.
2617
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002618- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002619
2620 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2621 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2622 positive infinities.
2623
2624 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2625 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2626 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2627 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2628 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2629 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2630 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2631
2632 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2633
2634 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2635
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002636- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2637 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2638 size of the executable.
2639
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002640- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2641 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2642 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2643 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002644
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002645- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2646
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002647- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2648 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2649 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002650
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002651- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2652 well as Unix.
2653
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002654- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2655 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2656 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2657 modules in the README file for details.
2658
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002659C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002660-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002661
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002662- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2663 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002664 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002665 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002666 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002667
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002668- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2669 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2670 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2671 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2672 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2673 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002674 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002675 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2676 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2677 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2678 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2679 aligned.)
2680
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002681- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2682 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2683 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2684
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002685- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2686 level.
2687
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002688- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2689 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2690 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2691 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2692 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2693
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002694- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2695 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2696 code.
2697
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002698- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2699 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2700 adjusting for negative indices.
2701
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002702- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2703 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2704 object.
2705
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002706- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2707 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2708 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2709
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002710- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2711 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002712
2713- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2714
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002715- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2716 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2717 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2718 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2719
2720- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2721
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002722- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002723
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002724- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002725 without going through the buffer API.
2726
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002727- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002728
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002729- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2730 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2731 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2732 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2733
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002734- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2735 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2736
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002737- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002738 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2739
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002740New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002741-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002742
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002743- OpenVMS is now supported.
2744
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002745- AtheOS is now supported.
2746
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002747- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2748
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002749- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2750
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002751Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002752-----
2753
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002754- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2755 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2756 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002757
2758Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002759-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002760
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002761- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2762 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2763 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2764 bugs.
2765 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002766 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002767 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2768 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002769 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002770
2771- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002772 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002773
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002774- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2775 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2776
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002777- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2778 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002779 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002780 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2781
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002782- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2783 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2784 use files" uninstall option).
2785
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002786- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2787
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002788- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2789 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2790
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002791- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2792 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2793 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2794
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002795- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2796 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2797 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2798 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2799 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002800 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2801 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2802 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002803
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002804- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002805 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002806 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2807 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2808 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2809 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2810 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2811 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2812 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2813 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2814 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2815 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2816 work around.
2817
2818- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2819 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2820 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2821 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2822 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2823 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2824 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2825 specified with O_CREAT too).
2826
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002827Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002828----
2829
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002830- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002831
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002832- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2833 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2834 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2835
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002836- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2837 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2838 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2839
2840- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2841 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2842 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2843 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2844 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2845 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2846 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2847 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002848
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002849- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2850 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2851 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002852
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002853- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2854 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2855 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2856 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2857 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002858
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002859- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2860 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2861 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002862
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002863- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2864 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002865
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002866- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2867 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2868 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2869 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2870 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002871
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002872- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2873 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2874 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2875
2876- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2877 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2878 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002879
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002880- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2881 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2882 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2883 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002884 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002885
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002886- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2887 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002888
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002889- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2890 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002891
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002892- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002893 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002894 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2895 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002896
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002897
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002898What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002899===============================
2900
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002901*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2902
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002903Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002904--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002905
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002906- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2907 with a custom metaclass.
2908
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002909Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002910-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002911
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002912- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2913 are proxies.
2914
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002915Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002916-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002917
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002918- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2919 very short strings.
2920
2921- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2922 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2923 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2924 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2925 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2926
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002927Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002928-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002929
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002930- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2931 close or delete time).
2932
2933- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2934 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2935
2936- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2937
2938- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002939 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002940
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002941Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002942-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002943
2944Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002945-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002946
2947C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002948-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002949
2950New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002951-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002952
2953Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002954-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002955
2956Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002957-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002958
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002959- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2960
2961- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2962 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2963
2964- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2965 deleted at process exit time.
2966
2967- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2968 in backslash.
2969
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002970Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002971----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002972
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002973- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2974 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2975 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2976
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002977
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002978What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002979===========================
2980
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002981*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2982
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002983Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002984--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002985
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002986- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2987 been extensively updated. See
2988
2989 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2990
2991 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2992
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002993- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2994 deleted!
2995
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002996- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2997 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2998 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2999 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3000 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3001
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003002- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3003
3004 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3005 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3006
3007 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3008 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3009 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3010 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3011 supported anyway.
3012
3013 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3014 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3015
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003016- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3017 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3018 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3019 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3020 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003021
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003022- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3023 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3024 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3025
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003026Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003027-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003028
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003029- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3030 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3031 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3032 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3033 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3034 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003035 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3036 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3037 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3038 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003039
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003040- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3041 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3042 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3043
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003044Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003045-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003046
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003047- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3048
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003049Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003050-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003051
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003052- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3053 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3054 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3055 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3056 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3057 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3058
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003059- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3060
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003061- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3062
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003063- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3064
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003065- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3066 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3067 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3068
3069- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3070
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003071Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003072-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003073
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003074- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3075 off a search on Google.
3076
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003077Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003078-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003079
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003080- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3081 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3082 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3083 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3084 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3085 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3086 other platforms should do likewise.
3087
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003088- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3089 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3090 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3091
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003092C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003093-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003094
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003095- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3096 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3097 producing key-value pairs.
3098
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003099- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003100 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003101 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3102 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3103 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3104 previously went unchallenged.
3105
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003106New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003107-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003108
3109Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003110-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003111
3112Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003113-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003114
3115Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003116----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003117
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003118- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3119 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003120
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003121- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3122 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3123 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3124 home.
3125
3126
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003127What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003128===========================
3129
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003130*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3131
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003132Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003133--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003134
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003135- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3136 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003137
3138 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003139 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003140
3141 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3142 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003143 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003144 This needs to be documented.
3145
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003146- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3147 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3148
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003149- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3150 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3151 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3152
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003153- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3154 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3155
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003156- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3157 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3158 class forbids it).
3159
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003160- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3161 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3162 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3163
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003164- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3165
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003166Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003167-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003168
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003169- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3170 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003171 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003172
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003173- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3174 (like 1 + '').
3175
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003176Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003177-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003178
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003179- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3180 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3181 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3182 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003183 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003184 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3185
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003186- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3187 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3188 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3189 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3190
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003191- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3192 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003193 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3194 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3195 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003196
3197- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3198 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003199
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003200- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3201 bytes on its input.
3202
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003203Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003204-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003205
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003206- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003207 convenience function.
3208
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003209- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3210 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3211 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003212 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3213 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3214 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3215 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3216 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3217 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003218
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003219- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3220 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3221 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3222 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3223
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003224- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3225 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3226 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3227
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003228- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3229 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3230 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3231 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3232
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003233- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3234 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003235 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003236 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3237 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3238 new -l and -e options.
3239
3240- statcache is now deprecated.
3241
3242- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3243 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003244 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003245 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3246 time properly taken into account.
3247
3248- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3249 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3250 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3251 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3252
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003253Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003254-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003255
3256Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003257-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003258
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003259- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3260 is built with libdb3 if available.
3261
3262- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3263
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003264C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003265-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003266
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003267- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3268 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3269 PySequence_Size().
3270
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003271- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3272
3273- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3274 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3275 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3276
3277- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3278 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3279
3280- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3281 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3282
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003283New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003284-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003285
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003286- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3287 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3288
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003289- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3290 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3291
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003292- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3293
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003294Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003295-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003296
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003297- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3298 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3299
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003300Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003301-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003302
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003303Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003304----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003305
3306- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3307 removed completely in the next release.
3308
3309- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3310 OSX.
3311
3312- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3313 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3314
3315- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3316
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003317
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003318What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003319===========================
3320
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003321*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3322
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003323Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003324--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003325
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003326- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003327 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003328 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003329 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3330 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003331 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3332 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003333 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3334 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003335
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003336- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3337 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3338
3339- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3340 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3341
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003342Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003343-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003344
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003345- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3346 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3347 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3348 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3349 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3350 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3351 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3352 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3353
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003354- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3355 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3356 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3357 example).
3358
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003359- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003360 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003361 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003362 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003363
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003364- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3365 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3366 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003367 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003368
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003369- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3370 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3371 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3372 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3373 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3374 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3375
3376 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3377
3378 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3379
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003380Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003381-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003382
3383- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3384
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003385- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3386
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003387- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3388 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003389
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003390- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3391 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3392 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3393 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3394 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3395 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003396 attributes.
3397
3398- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3399 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3400 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003401
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003402- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3403 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3404 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003405
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003406- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3407 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3408 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003409 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3410 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3411
3412- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3413 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003414
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003415Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003416-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003417
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003418- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3419 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3420
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003421- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3422 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3423 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3424 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3425
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003426- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3427 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3428 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3429 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3430
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003431 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3432 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3433 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3434 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3435 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3436 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3437 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3438 without losing information).
3439
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003440- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003441 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3442 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3443 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3444 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3445 module).
3446
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003447 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003448 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3449 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3450 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3451 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003452
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003453- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003454 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3455 encoding.
3456
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003457- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3458 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3459
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003460- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003461 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3462
3463- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3464 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3465 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3466 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3467
3468- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3469
3470- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3471 ON, and OFF.
3472
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003473- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3474 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3475
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003476Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003477-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003478
3479- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3480 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3481 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003482
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003483- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3484 been added: -X and -E.
3485
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003486Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003487-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003488
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003489- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3490 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3491
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003492C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003493-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003494
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003495- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3496 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3497 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3498 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3499 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3500
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003501- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3502 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3503 as long) arguments.
3504
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003505- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3506 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3507 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3508 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3509 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3510 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3511
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003512- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3513 input.
3514
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003515New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003516-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003517
3518Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003519-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003520
3521Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003522-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003523
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003524- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3525 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3526 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3527
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003528- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3529 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3530 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003531 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003532
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003533 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3534 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3535 import signal
3536 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003537
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003538 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003539 while 1:
3540 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003541 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003542 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3543 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3544 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3545 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003546
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003547
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003548What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3549===========================
3550
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003551*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3552
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003553Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003554--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003555
3556- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3557 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3558 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3559
3560- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3561 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3562 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3563 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3564 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3565 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3566 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003567
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003568- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003569 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003570 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3571 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3572 associate a docstring with a property.
3573
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003574- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3575 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3576 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3577 other built-in object types.
3578
3579- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3580 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3581 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3582 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3583 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3584
3585- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3586 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3587
3588- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3589 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003590 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003591 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3592 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3593 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3594 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3595 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3596
3597- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3598 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3599 class.
3600
3601- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3602 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3603 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3604 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3605
3606- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3607 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3608 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3609 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3610
3611- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3612 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3613
3614- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3615 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3616 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3617 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3618 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003619 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003620 with the same value as s.
3621
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003622- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3623
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003624Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003625----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003626
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003627- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3628
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003629- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3630 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3631 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3632 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3633 objects.
3634
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003635- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3636 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003637 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3638 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3639
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003640- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3641 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3642 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3643
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003644Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003645-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003646
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003647- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3648 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3649 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3650 by the instances.
3651
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003652- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3653 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3654 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3655
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003656- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3657 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3658 before the entire comparison is complete.
3659
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003660- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3661 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3662 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3663
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003664- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3665 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3666 getwriter().
3667
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003668- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3669 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3670
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003671- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003672 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3673 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3674
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003675- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3676 iterable object.
3677
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003678- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3679 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003680
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003681- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3682 authentication.
3683
3684- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3685 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003686
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003687- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003688 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3689 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3690 a sample driver.)
3691
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003692Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003693-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003694
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003695- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3696 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3697 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3698 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3699 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3700 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3701 kernel has large file support.
3702
3703- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3704 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3705 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3706 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3707 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3708
3709- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3710 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3711 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3712
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003713C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003714-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003715
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003716- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3717 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3718
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003719New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003720-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003721
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003722- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3723 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3724
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003725Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003726-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003727
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003728- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3729 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3730 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3731 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3732 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3733
3734- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3735 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3736 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3737 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3738
3739- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3740 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3741
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003742Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003743-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003744
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003745- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003746 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3747 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003748
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003749
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003750What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3751===========================
3752
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003753*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3754
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003755Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003756----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003757
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003758- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3759 big to represent as a C double.
3760
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003761- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3762 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3763 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3764 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3765 restriction).
3766
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003767- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3768 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3769 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3770 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3771 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3772
3773 >>> dir([])
3774 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3775 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3776 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3777 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3778 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3779 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3780 'reverse', 'sort']
3781
3782 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3783
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003784- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003785 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3786 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3787 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3788 OverflowError exception.
3789
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003790- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003791 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003792 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3793 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3794 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3795 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3796 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003797 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003798 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3799 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3800
3801 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3802 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3803 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3804 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003805
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003806- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003807 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3808 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3809 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3810 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3811 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3812 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3813 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3814 once it is created.
3815
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003816- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3817 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3818 (key, value) pairs.
3819
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003820- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003821 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3822 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3823
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003824- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3825 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3826 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3827 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3828 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003829
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003830- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003831 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3832 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3833
3834 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3835
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003836- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003837 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3838
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003839Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003840-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003841
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003842- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003843 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3844 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003845
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003846- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3847 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3848 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3849 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3850 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3851 in this area anymore).
3852
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003853- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3854 threading.Timer.
3855
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003856- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3857 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3858
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003859- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003860 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3861
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003862- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003863 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3864 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3865 converted to Python longs.
3866
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003867- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003868 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3869
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003870- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3871 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3872 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3873
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003874Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003875-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003876
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003877- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3878 division operators as per PEP 238.
3879
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003880Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003881-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003882
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003883- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3884 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3885 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3886 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3887
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003888C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003889-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003890
3891- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003892
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003893- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3894 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003895 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003896
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003897 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3898 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003899 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003900 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003901
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003902- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003903 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3904 module:
3905
3906 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003907
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003908 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3909 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003910
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003911 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3912 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003913
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003914 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3915
3916 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3917
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003918- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003919 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3920 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3921 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003922
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003923New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003924-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003925
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003926- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3927 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3928 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3929 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3930 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003931
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003932Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003933-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003934
3935Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003936-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003937
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003938- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3939 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3940 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3941 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003942 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3943 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3944 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3945 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3946 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003947
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003948- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003949 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3950
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003951
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003952What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3953===========================
3954
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003955*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3956
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003957Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003958-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003959
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003960- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3961 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3962
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003963- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3964 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3965 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003966
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003967- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3968 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3969 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3970 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003971
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003972- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3973
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003974- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003975
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003976Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003977-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003978
3979- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003980 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003981 the module docstring for details.
3982
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003983Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003984-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003985
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003986- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003987 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3988 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3989 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003990
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003991- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3992 Nick Mathewson.
3993
3994Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003995----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003996
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003997- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3998 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3999 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4000 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4001 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4002 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4003 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4004 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4005
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004006- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4007 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4008 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4009 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4010
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004011- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4012 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4013 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4014 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4015 come a long way).
4016
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004017- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4018 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4019 write filters for these warnings).
4020
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004021- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4022 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4023 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4024 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4025 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4026
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004027- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4028 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4029 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4030 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4031 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4032 older distribution.
4033
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004034Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004035-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004036
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004037- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4038 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004039 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004040
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004041- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4042 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4043 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4044
4045- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4046
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004047- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4048
4049- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4050
4051- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4052
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004053- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004054
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004055- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4056
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004057New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004058-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004059
4060C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004061-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004062
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004063- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4064 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4065 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4066 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4067 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4068 against buffer overruns.
4069
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004070- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004071 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4072 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004073 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4074 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4075 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4076
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004077- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4078 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4079 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4080 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4081 deprecated.
4082
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004083Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004084-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004085
4086- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4087 relevant is found.
4088
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004089
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004090What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004091===========================
4092
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004093*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4094
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004095Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004096----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004097
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004098- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4099 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4100 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4101 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4102 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4103 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4104 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4105 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004106 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004107 repaired.
4108
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004109- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004110 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004111 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4112 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4113 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4114 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4115 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4116 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4117 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4118 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4119
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004120- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4121 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4122 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4123 leading BMO character).
4124
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004125- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4126 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4127 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4128
4129 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4130 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4131 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004132
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004133 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4134 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4135 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4136 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4137 for various simple to use conversions.
4138
4139 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4140 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4141
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004142 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4143 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4144 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4145 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4146 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4147 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4148 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4149 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4150 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4151 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4152 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4153 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4154 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4155 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4156 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004157
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004158- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4159 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4160 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004161 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004162 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004163
4164 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004165 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4166 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4167 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4168 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4169 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004170 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4171 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004172
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004173 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4174 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4175 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004176 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004177
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004178- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4179 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4180 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4181 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4182 floating arithmetic,
4183
4184 x = 9007199254740992.0
4185 print long(x)
4186
4187 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4188 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4189 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4190 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4191 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4192 functions are of good quality).
4193
4194 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4195 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4196 algorithms to break.
4197
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004198- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4199 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4200 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4201 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4202 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4203 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4204 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4205 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4206 order.
4207
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004208- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4209 operation along the most common code paths.
4210
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004211- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4212 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4213
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004214- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4215 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4216 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4217 {}.update(UserDict())
4218
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004219- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4220 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4221 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4222 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4223 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4224 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4225 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4226 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4227
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004228- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004229 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004230
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004231 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004232 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4233 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004234 join() method of strings
4235 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004236 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4237 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004238 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004239 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004240
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004241- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4242 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4243
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004244- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4245 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4246
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004247- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4248 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4249 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4250 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4251
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004252- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4253 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004254 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004255 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4256 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004257
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004258- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4259
4260
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004261Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004262-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004263
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004264- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004265 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004266 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4267 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4268
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004269- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4270 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4271
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004272- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4273 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4274 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4275 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4276
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004277- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4278 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4279 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4280
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004281- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4282
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004283- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4284
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004285- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4286 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4287 that are still imported into string.py).
4288
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004289- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4290
4291- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4292 Now it does.
4293
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004294- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4295
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004296- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4297 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4298 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4299 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4300 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004301 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4302 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004303
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004304- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4305 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4306 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4307 'help(object)'.
4308
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004309Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004310-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004311
4312- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004313 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004314 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4315 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4316
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004317- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004318 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4319 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004320
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004321C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004322-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004323
4324- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4325 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004326
4327----
4328
4329**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**