blob: 06f64f64f229c56e298f8783eabb02cc89339e07 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Georg Brandlabd1ff82006-03-18 07:59:59 +000015- Previously, Python code had no easy way to access the contents of a
16 cell object. Now, a ``cell_contents`` attribute has been added
17 (closes patch #1170323).
18
Tim Peterscf79aac2006-03-16 01:14:46 +000019- Patch #1123430: Python's small-object allocator now returns an arena to
20 the system ``free()`` when all memory within an arena becomes unused
21 again. Prior to Python 2.5, arenas (256KB chunks of memory) were never
22 freed. Some applications will see a drop in virtual memory size now,
23 especially long-running applications that, from time to time, temporarily
24 use a large number of small objects. Note that when Python returns an
25 arena to the platform C's ``free()``, there's no guarantee that the
26 platform C will in turn return that memory to the operating system. The
27 effect of the patch is to stop making that impossible, and in tests it
28 appears to be effective at least on Microsoft C and gcc-based systems.
29 Thanks to Evan Jones for hard work and patience.
30
Georg Brandl533ff6f2006-03-08 18:09:27 +000031- Patch #1434038: property() now uses the getter's docstring if there is
32 no "doc" argument given. This makes it possible to legitimately use
33 property() as a decorator to produce a read-only property.
34
Guido van Rossum9aa37ab2006-03-07 18:54:08 +000035- PEP 357, patch 1436368: add an __index__ method to int/long and a matching
36 nb_index slot to the PyNumberMethods struct. The slot is consulted instead
37 of requiring an int or long in slicing and a few other contexts, enabling
38 other objects (e.g. Numeric Python's integers) to be used as slice indices.
39
Neal Norwitz995acdf2006-03-07 05:01:00 +000040- Fixed various bugs reported by Coverity's Prevent tool.
41
Brett Cannonbf364092006-03-01 04:25:17 +000042- PEP 352, patch #1104669: Make exceptions new-style objects. Introduced the
43 new exception base class, BaseException, which has a new message attribute.
44 KeyboardInterrupt and SystemExit to directly inherit from BaseException now.
45 Raising a string exception now raises a DeprecationWarning.
46
Thomas Woutersfb609f42006-02-28 16:37:25 +000047- Patch #1438387, PEP 328: relative and absolute imports. Imports can now be
48 explicitly relative, using 'from .module import name' to mean 'from the same
49 package as this module is in. Imports without dots still default to the
50 old relative-then-absolute, unless 'from __future__ import
51 absolute_import' is used.
52
Brett Cannona7446e32006-02-27 23:39:10 +000053- Properly check if 'warnings' raises an exception (usually when a filter set
54 to "error" is triggered) when raising a warning for raising string
55 exceptions.
56
Neal Norwitz0023a2f2006-02-27 23:24:48 +000057- CO_GENERATOR_ALLOWED is no longer defined, this behavior is the default.
58 The name was removed from Include/code.h.
59
Neal Norwitzeb651252006-02-27 16:47:12 +000060- PEP 308: conditional expressions were added (x if cond else y).
61
Guido van Rossum1968ad32006-02-25 22:38:04 +000062- Patch 1433928:
63 - The copy module now "copies" function objects (as atomic objects).
64 - dict.__getitem__ now looks for a __missing__ hook before raising
65 KeyError.
66
Tim Peters84ef21c2006-02-28 20:39:06 +000067- PEP 343: with statement implemented. Needs ``from __future__ import
68 with_statement``. Use of 'with' as a variable will generate a warning.
69 Use of 'as' as a variable will also generate a warning (unless it's
Neal Norwitz055ec242006-02-28 20:06:49 +000070 part of an import statement).
Guido van Rossum1a5e21e2006-02-28 21:57:43 +000071 The following objects have __context__ methods:
72 - The built-in file type.
73 - The thread.LockType type.
74 - The following types defined by the threading module:
75 Lock, RLock, Condition, Semaphore, BoundedSemaphore.
76 - The decimal.Context class.
Guido van Rossumc2e20742006-02-27 22:32:47 +000077
Marc-André Lemburgfe4b34c2006-02-19 15:22:22 +000078- Fix the encodings package codec search function to only search
79 inside its own package. Fixes problem reported in patch #1433198.
80
81 Note: Codec packages should implement and register their own
82 codec search function. PEP 100 has the details.
83
Martin v. Löwis18e16552006-02-15 17:27:45 +000084- PEP 353: Using ssize_t as the index type.
85
Neal Norwitzfc76d632006-01-10 06:03:13 +000086- Patch #1400181, fix unicode string formatting to not use the locale.
87 This is how string objects work. u'%f' could use , instead of .
88 for the decimal point. Now both strings and unicode always use periods.
89
Neal Norwitz671b9e32006-01-09 07:07:12 +000090- Bug #1244610, #1392915, fix build problem on OpenBSD 3.7 and 3.8.
91 configure would break checking curses.h.
92
Georg Brandlcd4d1e82005-12-27 17:37:07 +000093- Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be
94 built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set.
95
Neal Norwitzc10978f2005-12-19 06:07:16 +000096- Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
97
Neal Norwitz5d0ad502005-12-19 04:27:42 +000098- Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
99
Neal Norwitzdb83eb32005-12-18 05:29:30 +0000100- Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
101
Neal Norwitze7214a12005-12-18 05:03:17 +0000102- Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
103 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
104
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +0000105- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
Barry Warsawd3c38ff2006-03-07 09:46:03 +0000106 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.subversion. Build number
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +0000107 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
108
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +0000109- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
110 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +0000111 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +0000112
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +0000113- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
114 now encodes backslash correctly.
115
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +0000116- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
117
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +0000118- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
119 and long longs.
120
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +0000121- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
122 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
123 message in this case.
124
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +0000125- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
126 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
127 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
128 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
129 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
130
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000131- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +0000132
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000133- Speed up some Unicode operations.
134
Martin v. Löwisbd260da2006-02-26 19:42:26 +0000135- A new AST parser implementation was completed. The abstract
136 syntax tree is available for read-only (non-compile) access
Martin v. Löwis577b5b92006-02-27 15:23:19 +0000137 to Python code; an _ast module was added.
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000138
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +0000139- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +0000140 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
141
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +0000142- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
143
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +0000144- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
145 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
146
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +0000147- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
148
149- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
150
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +0000151- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
152 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
153 was empty.
154
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +0000155- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
156 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
157
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +0000158- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +0000159 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +0000160
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +0000161- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
162 codes.
163
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +0000164- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
165 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
166 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
167
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +0000168- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
169 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
170
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +0000171- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +0000172 (fixes bug #1119418).
173
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +0000174- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
175
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +0000176- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
177 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
178
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +0000179- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
180 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
181 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
182
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +0000183- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
184
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +0000185- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
186 reference counts in some error exit cases.
187
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000188- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
189 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
190 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
191 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
192 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
193 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
194 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
195 realloc.
196
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000197- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
198 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
199
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000200- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
201 like their int counterparts.
202
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000203- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
204 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
205 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
206 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
207 for a longer write-up of the problem).
208
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000209- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
210 serializing floats.
211
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000212- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
213 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
214 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
215
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000216- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
217 278.
218
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000219- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
220 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
221 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
222 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000223 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000224 PyNumber_*().
225 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
226
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000227- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
228 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
229 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
230 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
231
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000232- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
233 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
234 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
235 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
236 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
237
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000238- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
239 disabled caused a crash.
240
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000241- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
242 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
243
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000244- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000245 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
246
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000247- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
248
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000249- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000250 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
251 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
252 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000253
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000254- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
255
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000256- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
257 returning None.
258
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000259- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000260 ('\') with a specific error message.
261
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000262- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
263
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000264- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
265 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
266
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000267- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000268 an ferror() call.
269
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000270- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
271 list.sort().
272
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000273- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
274 (2+3) --> (5).
275
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000276- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
277
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000278- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
279 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000280
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000281- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
282 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
283 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
284
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000285- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
286 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
287 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
288
Tim Petersf4e69282006-02-27 17:15:31 +0000289- Patch #1413181: changed ``PyThreadState_Delete()`` to forget about the
290 current thread state when the auto-GIL-state machinery knows about
291 it (since the thread state is being deleted, continuing to remember it
292 can't help, but can hurt if another thread happens to get created with
293 the same thread id).
294
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000295Extension Modules
296-----------------
297
Neal Norwitz05a45592006-03-20 06:30:08 +0000298- Patch #1309579: wait3 and wait4 were added to the posix module.
299
Anthony Baxterfa869072006-03-20 05:21:58 +0000300- Patch #1231053: The audioop module now supports encoding/decoding of alaw.
301 In addition, the existing ulaw code was updated.
302
Georg Brandlbc45a3f2006-03-17 19:17:34 +0000303- RFE #567972: Socket objects' family, type and proto properties are
304 now exposed via new get...() methods.
305
Neal Norwitz10be10c2006-03-16 06:50:13 +0000306- Everything under lib-old was removed. This includes the following modules:
307 Para, addpack, cmp, cmpcache, codehack, dircmp, dump, find, fmt, grep,
308 lockfile, newdir, ni, packmail, poly, rand, statcache, tb, tzparse,
309 util, whatsound, whrandom, zmod
310
311- The following modules were removed: regsub, reconvert, regex, regex_syntax.
312
313- re and sre were swapped, so help(re) provides full help. importing sre
Neal Norwitzefbeaef2006-03-16 06:40:39 +0000314 is deprecated. The undocumented re.engine variable no longer exists.
315
Hye-Shik Changabb903f2006-03-13 10:20:08 +0000316- Bug #1448490: Fixed a bug that ISO-2022 codecs could not handle
317 SS2 (single-shift 2) escape sequences correctly.
318
Martin v. Löwis480f1bb2006-03-09 23:38:20 +0000319- The unicodedata module was updated to the 4.1 version of the Unicode
320 database. The 3.2 version is still available as unicodedata.db_3_2_0
321 for applications that require this specific version (such as IDNA).
322
Neal Norwitzb62c4332006-03-04 18:35:47 +0000323- The timing module is no longer built by default. It was deprecated
324 in PEP 4 in Python 2.0 or earlier.
325
Guido van Rossum1968ad32006-02-25 22:38:04 +0000326- Patch 1433928: Added a new type, defaultdict, to the collections module.
327 This uses the new __missing__ hook behavior added to dict (see above).
328
Georg Brandldbd83392006-02-20 09:42:33 +0000329- Bug #854823: socketmodule now builds on Sun platforms even when
330 INET_ADDRSTRLEN is not defined.
331
Georg Brandlf4f44152006-02-18 22:29:33 +0000332- Patch #1393157: os.startfile() now has an optional argument to specify
333 a "command verb" to invoke on the file.
334
Neal Norwitz082b2df2006-02-07 07:04:46 +0000335- Bug #876637, prevent stack corruption when socket descriptor
336 is larger than FD_SETSIZE.
337
Neal Norwitz0e6bc8c2006-02-05 05:45:43 +0000338- Patch #1407135, bug #1424041: harmonize mmap behavior of anonymous memory.
339 mmap.mmap(-1, size) now returns anonymous memory in both Unix and Windows.
340 mmap.mmap(0, size) should not be used on Windows for anonymous memory.
341
Martin v. Löwis57a34e82006-02-04 19:12:37 +0000342- Patch #1422385: The nis module now supports access to domains other
343 than the system default domain.
344
Martin v. Löwis14694662006-02-03 12:54:16 +0000345- Use Win32 API to implement os.stat/fstat. As a result, subsecond timestamps
346 are reported, the limit on path name lengths is removed, and stat reports
347 WindowsError now (instead of OSError).
348
Gregory P. Smithcfc4a8d2006-01-29 19:46:23 +0000349- Add bsddb.db.DBEnv.set_tx_timestamp allowing time based database recovery.
350
Neal Norwitz62a21122006-01-25 05:21:55 +0000351- Bug #1413192, fix seg fault in bsddb if a transaction was deleted
352 before the env.
353
Martin v. Löwis11017b12006-01-14 18:12:57 +0000354- Patch #1103116: Basic AF_NETLINK support.
355
Neal Norwitz3b4fff82006-01-11 08:54:45 +0000356- Bug #1402308, (possible) segfault when using mmap.mmap(-1, ...)
357
Neal Norwitz88bbd732006-01-10 07:05:44 +0000358- Bug #1400822, _curses over{lay,write} doesn't work when passing 6 ints.
359 Also fix ungetmouse() which did not accept arguments properly.
360 The code now conforms to the documented signature.
361
Neal Norwitz5e3d8622006-01-09 06:24:35 +0000362- Bug #1400115, Fix segfault when calling curses.panel.userptr()
363 without prior setting of the userptr.
364
Neal Norwitz40c6b472006-01-05 05:43:35 +0000365- Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb.
366
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000367- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
368
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000369- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
370 problem on AIX.
371
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000372- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
373
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000374- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
375
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000376- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
377
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000378- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
379 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
380
Gregory P. Smithe101df92006-01-24 20:09:45 +0000381- Patch #1407992, fixes broken bsddb module db associate when using
382 BerkeleyDB 3.3, 4.0 or 4.1.
383
384- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 4.4
385
386- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 3.2
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000387
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000388- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
389 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
390
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000391- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
392
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000393- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
394 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
395
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000396- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
397 returns in cStringIO.c.
398
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000399- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
400 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
401
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000402- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
403
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000404- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
405
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000406- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
407 the file system encoding.
408
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000409- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
410 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000411
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000412- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
413
414- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000415 line without newlines.
416
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000417- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
418 on Windows.
419
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000420- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000421 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
422
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000423- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
424 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
425 for large or negative values.
426
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000427- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000428 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000429
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000430- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
431
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000432- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
433 if available on the platform.
434
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000435- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
436 available on the platform.
437
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000438- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
439 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
440
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000441- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
442
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000443- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
444 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
445 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
446
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000447- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
448
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000449- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
450 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
451
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000452- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000453 file size.
454
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000455- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
456
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000457- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
458 {remove_history,replace_history}
459
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000460- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
461 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000462
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000463- stat_float_times is now True.
464
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000465- array.array objects are now picklable.
466
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000467- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
468 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
469
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000470- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
471 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
472 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
473
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000474- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
475 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000476
477Library
478-------
479
Walter Dörwaldabb02e52006-03-15 11:35:15 +0000480- Patch #1436130: codecs.lookup() now returns a CodecInfo object (a subclass
481 of tuple) that provides incremental decoders and encoders (a way to use
482 stateful codecs without the stream API). Functions
483 codecs.getincrementaldecoder() and codecs.getincrementalencoder() have
484 been added.
485
Walter Dörwald067db482006-03-15 22:17:27 +0000486- Patch #1359365: Calling next() on a closed StringIO.String object raises
487 a ValueError instead of a StopIteration now (like file and cString.String do).
488 cStringIO.StringIO.isatty() will raise a ValueError now if close() has been
489 called before (like file and StringIO.StringIO do).
Walter Dörwald197e8322006-03-15 22:13:13 +0000490
Martin v. Löwis04824ce2006-03-10 21:26:16 +0000491- A regrtest option -w was added to re-run failed tests in verbose mode.
492
Georg Brandle2b46772006-03-09 23:22:43 +0000493- Patch #1446372: quit and exit can now be called from the interactive
494 interpreter to exit.
495
Barry Warsawd3c38ff2006-03-07 09:46:03 +0000496- The function get_count() has been added to the gc module, and gc.collect()
497 grew an optional 'generation' argument.
498
Martin v. Löwisfbab90e2006-03-05 13:36:04 +0000499- A library msilib to generate Windows Installer files, and a distutils
500 command bdist_msi have been added.
501
Guido van Rossum1a5e21e2006-02-28 21:57:43 +0000502- PEP 343: new module contextlib.py defines decorator @contextmanager
503 and helpful context managers nested() and closing().
504
Martin v. Löwis415ed932006-02-27 19:56:30 +0000505- The compiler package now supports future imports after the module docstring.
506
Georg Brandl8f7c54e2006-02-20 08:40:38 +0000507- Bug #1413790: zipfile now sanitizes absolute archive names that are
508 not allowed by the specs.
509
Georg Brandlc98eeed2006-02-19 14:57:47 +0000510- Patch #1215184: FileInput now can be given an opening hook which can
511 be used to control how files are opened.
512
Georg Brandlc029f872006-02-19 14:12:34 +0000513- Patch #1212287: fileinput.input() now has a mode parameter for
514 specifying the file mode input files should be opened with.
515
Georg Brandl67e9fb92006-02-19 13:56:17 +0000516- Patch #1215184: fileinput now has a fileno() function for getting the
517 current file number.
518
Georg Brandl602b9ba2006-02-19 13:26:36 +0000519- Patch #1349274: gettext.install() now optionally installs additional
520 translation functions other than _() in the builtin namespace.
521
Georg Brandle4662172006-02-19 09:51:27 +0000522- Patch #1337756: fileinput now accepts Unicode filenames.
523
Georg Brandl7b4e7c22006-02-18 21:10:56 +0000524- Patch #1373643: The chunk module can now read chunks larger than
525 two gigabytes.
526
Georg Brandl21dd1af2006-02-17 13:35:13 +0000527- Patch #1417555: SimpleHTTPServer now returns Last-Modified headers.
528
Georg Brandlbd3bc4d2006-02-17 09:52:53 +0000529- Bug #1430298: It is now possible to send a mail with an empty
530 return address using smtplib.
531
Georg Brandl0e1abe22006-02-17 09:48:14 +0000532- Bug #1432260: The names of lambda functions are now properly displayed
533 in pydoc.
Georg Brandl501dd0d2006-02-17 09:45:40 +0000534
Martin v. Löwis00756902006-02-05 17:09:41 +0000535- Patch #1412872: zipfile now sets the creator system to 3 (Unix)
536 unless the system is Win32.
537
Tim Petersda1329b2006-02-27 16:50:01 +0000538- Patch #1349118: urllib now supports user:pass@ style proxy
Martin v. Löwis3e865952006-01-24 15:51:21 +0000539 specifications, raises IOErrors when proxies for unsupported protocols
540 are defined, and uses the https proxy on https redirections.
541
Georg Brandl531ceba2006-01-21 07:20:56 +0000542- Bug #902075: urllib2 now supports 'host:port' style proxy specifications.
543
544- Bug #1407902: Add support for sftp:// URIs to urlparse.
Georg Brandl89f35ac2006-01-20 17:24:23 +0000545
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000546- Bug #1371247: Update Windows locale identifiers in locale.py.
547
Neal Norwitzf60cd472006-01-14 07:05:13 +0000548- Bug #1394565: SimpleHTTPServer now doesn't choke on query parameters
Georg Brandl45ab2332006-01-13 17:05:56 +0000549 any more.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000550
Georg Brandl4edd9892006-01-13 16:59:46 +0000551- Bug #1403410: The warnings module now doesn't get confused
552 when it can't find out the module name it generates a warning for.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000553
Martin v. Löwis412ed3b2006-01-08 10:45:39 +0000554- Patch #1177307: Added a new codec utf_8_sig for UTF-8 with a BOM signature.
555
Neal Norwitzab86f8e2005-12-23 21:44:36 +0000556- Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
557
Neal Norwitz338e7862005-12-23 21:27:46 +0000558- Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
559 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
560 LoadError subclasses IOError.
561
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000562- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000563 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
564 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
565 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
566 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
567
568 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
569 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
570 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
571 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
572 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000573
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000574- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
575 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
576 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
577
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000578- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
579
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000580- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
581
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000582- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
583 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
584 illegal argument)
585
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000586- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
587 is an error in the format string.
588
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000589- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
590
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000591- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000592 "parent" argument.
593
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000594- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
595 for padding.
596
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000597- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
598 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
599
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000600- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
601 to get the correct encoding.
602
603- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
604 languages.
605
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000606- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
607
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000608- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
609
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000610- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
611
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000612- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
613 functionality.
614
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000615- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
616
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000617- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
618 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
619
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000620- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
621 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
622 match the Content-Length header.
623
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000624- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
625
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000626- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
627 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000628 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000629
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000630- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
631
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000632- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
633
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000634- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
635 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
636
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000637- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
638 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
639 Tkdnd.
640
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000641- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
642 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
643
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000644- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
645 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
646
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000647- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000648 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
649
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000650- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
651 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
652
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000653- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
654 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
655
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000656- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000657 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000658
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000659- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
660
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000661- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
662 error messages.
663
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000664- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
665
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000666- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
667 Bug #1224621.
668
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000669- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
670 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
671 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
672 terminates by raising StopIteration.
673
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000674- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
675
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000676- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
677 component of the path.
678
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000679- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
680 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
681 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
682 class at all.
683
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000684- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
685 files to PyPI.
686
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000687- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
688 them to PyPI.
689
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000690- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
691 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
692 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
693 work as expected.
694
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000695- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
696 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
697
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000698- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000699 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
700
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000701- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
702
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000703- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
704 to build.
705
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000706- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
707 symbolic links on Windows.
708
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000709- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000710 profile.py if available.
711
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000712- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
713
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000714- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
715 in LWPCookieJar.
716
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000717- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
718
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000719- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
720
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000721- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
722
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000723- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
724
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000725- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
726
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000727- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
728
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000729- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
730
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000731- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
732
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000733- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
734 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
735 be exploited in various ways.
736
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000737- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000738 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
739
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000740- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
741 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
742
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000743- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000744 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
745
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000746- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
747
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000748- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
749
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000750- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
751
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000752- Enhancements to the csv module:
753
754 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000755 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000756 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000757 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
758 reporting.
759 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
760 dictates.
761 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000762 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000763 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000764 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
765 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000766 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
767 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000768 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000769 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
770 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
771 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
772 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
773 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
774 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
775 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
776 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
777 without first creating a dialect class.
778 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
779 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
780 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000781 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000782 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
783 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000784 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
785 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
786 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
787 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000788 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
789 This has been fixed.
790
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000791- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
792 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
793 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
794 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
795
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000796- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
797
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000798- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
799 (Bug #951915).
800
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000801- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
802 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
803 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000804 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000805
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000806- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
807
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000808- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
809 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
810
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000811- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
812
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000813- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
814
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000815- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
816
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000817- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
818
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000819- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
820
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000821- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
822 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
823 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
824
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000825- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000826 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000827
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000828- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
829 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
830 tokenizer with very long source lines.
831
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000832- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called
833 immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
834 ``.decompress()`` calls.
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000835
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000836- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
837 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000838
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000839- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
840 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
841
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000842- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
843 correctly.
844
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000845- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
846 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
847 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
848 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
849 between two lines.
850
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000851- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
852 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
853 handlers.
854
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000855- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000856 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
857 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000858
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000859- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
860 considering it exactly like a '*'.
861
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000862- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
863 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000864
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000865- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
866
Gustavo Niemeyer548148812006-01-31 18:34:13 +0000867- Patch #1413711: Certain patterns of differences were making difflib
868 touch the recursion limit.
869
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000870Build
871-----
872
Martin v. Löwis86d66262006-02-17 08:40:11 +0000873- Patch #1432345: Make python compile on DragonFly.
874
Martin v. Löwis856bf9a2006-02-14 20:42:55 +0000875- Build support for Win64-AMD64 was added.
876
Martin v. Löwisa55e55e2006-02-11 15:55:14 +0000877- Patch #1428494: Prefer linking against ncursesw over ncurses library.
878
Martin v. Löwisfd9a72a2006-01-08 10:07:33 +0000879- Patch #881820: look for openpty and forkpty also in libbsd.
880
Martin v. Löwis64c33dd2006-01-03 07:42:14 +0000881- The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3).
882 The zlib module is now builtin on Windows.
883
Martin v. Löwisd5845ec2005-12-30 12:31:38 +0000884- Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.
885
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000886- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
887 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
888
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000889- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
890 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
891
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000892- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
893 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
894 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000895 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000896
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000897- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
898 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
899 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
900
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000901- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
902
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000903- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
904 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
905
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000906- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
907 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
908 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
909 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
910 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
911 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
912 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
913 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
914
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000915- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
916 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
917 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
918 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
919
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000920C API
921-----
922
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000923- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
924
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000925- Removed PyRange_New().
926
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000927- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
928 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
929 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
930 mappings.
931
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000932
933Tests
934-----
935
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000936- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000937
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000938- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
939 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
940
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000941
942Documentation
943-------------
944
Georg Brandl8cb30772006-01-20 09:34:29 +0000945- Bug #1402224: Add warning to dl docs about crashes.
946
Georg Brandla3a93ae2006-01-20 09:14:36 +0000947- Bug #1396471: Document that Windows' ftell() can return invalid
948 values for text files with UNIX-style line endings.
949
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000950- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
951
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000952- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
953
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000954- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
955
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000956- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
957
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000958- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
959
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000960- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
961
962- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
963
964- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
965
966- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
967
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000968- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
969 Closes bug #1166582.
970
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000971- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
972 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
973 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
974
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000975Mac
976---
977
978
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000979New platforms
980-------------
981
982- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
983
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000984
985Tools/Demos
986-----------
987
Brett Cannonacde7342006-03-01 04:28:00 +0000988- Created Misc/Vim/vim_syntax.py to auto-generate a python.vim file in that
989 directory for syntax highlighting in Vim. Vim directory was added and placed
990 vimrc to it (was previous up a level).
991
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000992- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
993 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
994 source files that need an encoding declaration.
995 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
996
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000997- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
998
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000999- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00001000
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +00001001- Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
1002 wiggle over by a pixel.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00001003
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +00001004What's New in Python 2.4 final?
1005===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +00001006
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +00001007*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +00001008
1009Core and builtins
1010-----------------
1011
1012- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
1013 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
1014 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
1015
1016
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +00001017What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
1018==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00001019
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +00001020*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00001021
1022Core and builtins
1023-----------------
1024
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +00001025- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
1026 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
1027 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
1028
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00001029
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +00001030Library
1031-------
1032
1033- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
1034 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
1035 raised is re-raised.
1036
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +00001037- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
1038 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
1039
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +00001040- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
1041 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
1042 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
1043 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
1044 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
1045 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
1046 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
1047 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
1048 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
1049 by the slice are recomputed now.
1050
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +00001051- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +00001052
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00001053Build
1054-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +00001055
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +00001056- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
1057 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
1058 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00001059
1060C API
1061-----
1062
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +00001063- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
1064
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00001065
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001066What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
1067================================
1068
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +00001069*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001070
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001071License
1072-------
1073
1074The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
1075is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
1076changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
1077Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
1078intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
1079durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
1080the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
1081License::
1082
1083 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
1084
1085says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
1086to Python 2.1.1.
1087
1088The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
1089License Version 2.
1090
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001091Core and builtins
1092-----------------
1093
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +00001094- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
1095 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
1096 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
1097 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
1098 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
1099 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
1100 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +00001101 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +00001102 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
1103 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
1104
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +00001105- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001106
1107Extension Modules
1108-----------------
1109
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +00001110- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
1111 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
1112 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
1113 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001114
1115Library
1116-------
1117
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +00001118- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
1119 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
1120 returned.
1121
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +00001122- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
1123
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +00001124- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
1125 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
1126
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +00001127- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
1128
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +00001129- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
1130 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001131
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +00001132- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
1133
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +00001134- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
1135
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +00001136- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +00001137 the source code is updated and reloaded.
1138
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001139Build
1140-----
1141
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +00001142- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001143
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001144What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
1145================================
1146
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +00001147*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001148
1149Core and builtins
1150-----------------
1151
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001152- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +00001153 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
1154
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +00001155- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
1156 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
1157 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
1158 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
1159
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001160- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
1161 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
1162
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +00001163- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
1164 constant.
1165
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001166- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
1167 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
1168 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
1169 large), and to anomalies such as
1170 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
1171 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
1172 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
1173 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001174
1175Extension modules
1176-----------------
1177
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +00001178- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
1179 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001180 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
1181 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
1182 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001183
1184Library
1185-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001186
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001187- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001188 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001189 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
1190 --swig-cpp.
1191
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +00001192- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
1193 it is set.
1194
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +00001195- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +00001196
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +00001197- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
1198 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
1199 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
1200 Closes bug #1039270.
1201
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001202- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +00001203
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +00001204 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001205 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
1206 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
1207 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
1208 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
1209 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
1210 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
1211 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
1212 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
1213 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
1214 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
1215 + Updates to documentation.
1216
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +00001217- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
1218 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
1219 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
1220 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
1221
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001222- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001223
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +00001224- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
1225 applications should use the getmember function.
1226
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +00001227- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
1228
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +00001229- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
1230 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
1231 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
1232 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
1233 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
1234 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
1235 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
1236 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
1237 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
1238
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001239- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
1240 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +00001241 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001242
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001243- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
1244 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
1245 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
1246 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
1247 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
1248 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
1249 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
1250 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001251
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001252- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
1253 the new public features (of which there are many).
1254
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +00001255- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001256 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
1257 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
1258 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
1259 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001260 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001261
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +00001262- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
1263
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +00001264- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
1265 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
1266 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
1267 options.
1268
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +00001269- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
1270 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
1271 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
1272 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
1273 conditions under which non-string values work.
1274
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001275Build
1276-----
1277
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001278- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1279 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1280 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1281
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001282- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1283 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1284 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1285 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1286 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001287
1288C API
1289-----
1290
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001291- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1292 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1293
1294- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1295
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001296- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1297 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1298 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1299 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1300 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1301 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1302 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1303 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1304 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1305
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001306- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1307
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001308- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1309 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1310 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001311
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001312Tests
1313-----
1314
1315- test__locale ported to unittest
1316
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001317Mac
1318---
1319
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001320- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1321 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1322 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001323
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001324Tools/Demos
1325-----------
1326
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001327- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1328 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1329 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1330 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1331 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001332
1333
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001334What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1335=================================
1336
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001337*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001338
1339Core and builtins
1340-----------------
1341
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001342- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001343 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1344
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001345- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1346 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1347 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1348 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1349 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1350 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1351 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1352 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001353 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1354 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1355 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1356 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1357 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001358
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001359- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1360 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1361 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1362 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1363 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1364
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001365- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1366
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001367- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1368 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1369
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001370- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1371 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1372 modified the list.
1373
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001374- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1375 functions is now writable.
1376
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001377- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1378 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1379 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1380 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1381
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001382- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1383 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1384 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1385 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1386 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001387
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001388- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1389 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1390
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001391Extension modules
1392-----------------
1393
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001394- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1395
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001396- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1397 data.
1398
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001399- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1400 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1401 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1402 supposed to have been truncated away.
1403
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001404- Added socket.socketpair().
1405
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001406- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1407 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1408
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001409- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001410 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1411
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001412Library
1413-------
1414
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001415- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001416 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001417
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001418- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1419 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1420
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001421- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1422 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1423
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001424- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1425
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001426- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1427 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001428
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001429- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1430 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1431
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001432- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1433
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001434- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1435
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001436- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1437
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001438- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1439 Percivall.
1440
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001441- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1442 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1443
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001444- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1445 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1446 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001447 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001448
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001449- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1450 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1451 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1452 and exponent.
1453
1454- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1455
1456- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001457 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001458 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1459
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001460- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1461 to the readline module.
1462
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001463- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001464 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1465 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001466
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001467- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1468 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1469 contains symlinks.
1470
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001471- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1472 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1473
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001474- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1475 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1476 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1477
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001478- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1479 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1480 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1481 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1482 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1483 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1484 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1485 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1486 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1487 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1488 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1489 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1490 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1491
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001492- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1493
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001494Tools/Demos
1495-----------
1496
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001497- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1498 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1499
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001500- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1501
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001502Build
1503-----
1504
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001505- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1506 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1507 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1508 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1509 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1510 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1511 plans to do so.
1512
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001513- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1514 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1515
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001516- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1517 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1518
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001519- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1520 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1521
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001522- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1523 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1524
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001525- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1526 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1527
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001528C API
1529-----
1530
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001531..
1532
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001533Documentation
1534-------------
1535
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001536- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1537 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1538
1539- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1540 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1541 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001542
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001543New platforms
1544-------------
1545
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001546- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1547
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001548Tests
1549-----
1550
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001551..
1552
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001553Windows
1554-------
1555
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001556- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1557 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1558 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1559 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1560 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1561 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1562 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1563 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1564 the problem.
1565
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001566Mac
1567---
1568
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001569..
1570
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001571
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001572What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1573=================================
1574
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001575*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001576
1577Core and builtins
1578-----------------
1579
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001580- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1581 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1582 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1583 sensitive code.
1584
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001585- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001586 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001587
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001588 @staticmethod
1589 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001590
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001591 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001592
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001593- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1594 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1595 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1596 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1597 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1598 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1599 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1600 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1601 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1602 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1603 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1604
1605 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1606 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1607 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1608 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1609 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1610 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1611 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1612
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001613- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1614 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1615
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001616- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001617 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001618
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001619- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001620 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001621 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1622
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001623- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001624 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1625 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1626
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001627- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1628 types that support garbage collection.
1629
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001630- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1631
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001632- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1633 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1634 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1635 Jython.
1636
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001637- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1638
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001639- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1640 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1641
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001642- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1643 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1644 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001645
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001646- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1647 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1648 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1649
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001650Extension modules
1651-----------------
1652
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001653- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1654
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001655Library
1656-------
1657
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001658- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1659 TIS-620
1660
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001661- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1662 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1663 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1664 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1665 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1666 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1667 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1668 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1669 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1670 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1671
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001672- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1673
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001674- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1675 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1676 same as when the argument is omitted).
1677 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1678
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001679- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1680
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001681- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1682 schemes are offered.
1683
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001684- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1685
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001686- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1687 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1688 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1689
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001690- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1691
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001692- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1693 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1694
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001695- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1696 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1697 when dummy_threading is being used.
1698
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001699- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1700 from a tarfile.
1701
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001702- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001703 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001704
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001705- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1706 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1707 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1708 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1709
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001710- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1711 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1712
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001713- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1714 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1715 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1716 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1717 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1718 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1719 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1720 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1721 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1722 by some other method in progress).
1723
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001724- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1725 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1726 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001727
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001728- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1729
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001730- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1731 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1732 AM Kuchling.
1733
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001734- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1735 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1736 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1737
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001738- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1739 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1740 instead of unsigned.
1741
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001742- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001743 no longer part of the public API.
1744
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001745- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1746 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1747 string methods of the same name).
1748
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001749- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001750 SF patch 945642.
1751
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001752- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1753
1754 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1755
1756 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1757 DocTestSuites.
1758
1759- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1760 that provide thread-local data.
1761
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001762- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1763 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1764
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001765- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1766
1767- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1768 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1769 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1770
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001771- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1772
1773 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1774 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1775 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001776
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001777 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1778 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1779 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1780 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1781
1782 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1783 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1784
1785 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1786 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1787 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1788 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1789
1790 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1791 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1792 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1793 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1794 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1795
1796 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1797 wrapping help output.
1798
1799 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1800 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1801 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001802
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001803C API
1804-----
1805
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001806- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1807 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1808 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1809 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1810 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1811 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1812 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1813 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1814 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1815 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1816 its visible semantics have not changed.
1817
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001818- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1819 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1820
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001821Documentation
1822-------------
1823
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001824- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001825
1826 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001827 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001828
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001829 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001830
1831 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1832
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001833- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001834
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001835Tests
1836-----
1837
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001838- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001839 platforms that use the Makefile.
1840
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001841- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1842 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1843 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1844
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001845
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001846What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1847=================================
1848
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001849*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001850
1851Core and builtins
1852-----------------
1853
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001854- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1855 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1856 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1857 objects now (one object instead of three).
1858
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001859- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1860 Windows DLLs.
1861
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001862- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1863 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001864
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001865- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1866 a new .pyc magic.
1867
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001868- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1869 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1870 be there.
1871
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001872- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1873 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1874 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1875
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001876- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1877 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1878 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1879
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001880- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1881
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001882- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1883 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1884 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001885
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001886- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1887 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1888
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001889- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1890
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001891- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001892 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001893
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001894- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1895
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001896- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1897
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001898- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1899 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1900
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001901- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1902 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1903 Fixes bug #858016 .
1904
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001905- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1906 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1907 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1908
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001909- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1910 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1911 improves their performance (about 35%).
1912
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001913- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1914 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1915 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1916
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001917- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1918 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1919 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1920 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1921
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001922- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1923 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001924 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001925 length is not known).
1926
1927- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1928 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001929 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1930 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001931 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1932
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001933- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1934 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1935
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001936- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1937 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1938 keyword arguments.
1939
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001940- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1941 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1942 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1943
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001944- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1945 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1946 cases.
1947
1948- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1949 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1950 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1951 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1952 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1953 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1954 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1955 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1956 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1957 a release build.
1958
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001959- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1960 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1961
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001962- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001963 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001964
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001965- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1966 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1967 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1968 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1969 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1970 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1971 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1972 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1973 destroyed.
1974
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001975- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1976 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1977 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1978 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1979 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1980 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1981 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1982 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1983
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001984- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1985 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1986 character other than a space.
1987
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001988- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1989 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1990 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1991 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1992 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1993 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1994 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1995 attributes with the same name.
1996
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001997- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1998 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1999 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
2000 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
2001 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
2002 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
2003 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
2004 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
2005 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
2006 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
2007 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
2008 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
2009 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
2010 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00002011
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00002012- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
2013 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
2014 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
2015 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
2016 This has been repaired.
2017
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00002018- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
2019
2020- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
2021
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00002022- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
2023 over a sequence.
2024
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00002025- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002026 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00002027
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00002028- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
2029
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00002030- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
2031 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
2032 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
2033 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
2034 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
2035 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
2036 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
2037 records with equal keys is unchanged).
2038
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00002039- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
2040 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
2041 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
2042
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00002043- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
2044 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
2045 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
2046 freelist.
2047
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00002048- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
2049 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
2050
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00002051- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
2052 number.
2053
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00002054- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
2055 a TypeError exception.
2056
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00002057- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
2058 820195.
2059
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00002060- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
2061 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
2062 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
2063
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002064- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00002065 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
2066 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00002067
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00002068- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
2069 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
2070 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
2071
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00002072- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
2073 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002074 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00002075
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002076- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00002077 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
2078 the first call.
2079
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00002080
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002081Extension modules
2082-----------------
2083
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00002084- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
2085 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
2086
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002087- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
2088 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
2089 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
2090 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
2091 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
2092 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
2093 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00002094
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00002095- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
2096
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00002097- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
2098
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00002099- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
2100 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
2101
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00002102- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
2103 fewer false positives.
2104
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00002105- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
2106 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
2107
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002108- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00002109 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
2110
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00002111- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002112 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00002113 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00002114 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
2115 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00002116
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00002117- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
2118 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
2119 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
2120 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
2121
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00002122- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
2123 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
2124 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
2125 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
2126 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
2127 #897625.
2128
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00002129- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
2130 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
2131
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00002132- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
2133 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
2134 and pops on either side of the deque.
2135
2136- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
2137 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
2138
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00002139- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
2140 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
2141 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
2142 other functions that expect a function argument.
2143
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00002144- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
2145
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002146- os.getsid was added.
2147
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00002148- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
2149 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
2150 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
2151
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00002152- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
2153
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00002154- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
2155
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00002156- readline.clear_history was added.
2157
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00002158- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
2159
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00002160- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
2161
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00002162- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
2163
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00002164- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
2165
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00002166- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
2167
2168- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
2169
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00002170- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
2171
2172- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
2173
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002174- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
2175 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
2176 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
2177
2178- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
2179 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
2180 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
2181 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
2182 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
2183 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
2184 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
2185
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00002186- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
2187 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
2188 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
2189 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002190
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002191- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002192 iterators from a single iterable.
2193
2194- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
2195 of raising a TypeError exception.
2196
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00002197- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
2198 as parameter.
2199
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002200Library
2201-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00002202
Armin Rigoa871ef22006-02-08 12:53:56 +00002203- Added a new module: cProfile, a C profiler with the same interface as the
2204 profile module. cProfile avoids some of the drawbacks of the hotshot
2205 profiler and provides a bit more information than the other two profilers.
2206 Based on "lsprof" (patch #1212837).
2207
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00002208- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
2209
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00002210- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
2211 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
2212 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002213
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00002214- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
2215 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
2216 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00002217
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00002218- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00002219
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00002220- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
2221 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00002222
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00002223- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
2224 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
2225
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002226- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
2227
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002228- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002229 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002230
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002231- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00002232 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002233
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00002234- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
2235
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00002236- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
2237 on cygwin and mingw32.
2238
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00002239- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
2240
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00002241- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
2242 module.
2243
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00002244- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
2245 installation scheme for all platforms.
2246
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002247- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00002248 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002249
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002250- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
2251 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
2252 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
2253
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00002254- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
2255 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
2256 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
2257
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00002258- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
2259
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00002260- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
2261
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00002262- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
2263 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
2264
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00002265- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
2266 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
2267 type pattern with the same value exists.
2268
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00002269- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
2270 when run from the command prompt).
2271
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002272- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
2273 not taken into consideration when caching value.
2274
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00002275- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
2276 default sort).
2277
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00002278- Added global runctx function to profile module
2279
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00002280- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
2281
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00002282- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2283
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002284- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2285
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002286- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002287 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2288 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2289 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2290 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2291 accordingly.
2292
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002293- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2294 decoding standards.
2295
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002296- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2297 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2298 called for all requests.
2299
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002300- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2301 they are passed to the compiler.
2302
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002303- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2304 indent, width and depth.
2305
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002306- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2307 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2308
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002309- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2310 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2311
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002312- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2313
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002314- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2315
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002316- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2317
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002318- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2319 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2320
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002321- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002322 for better performance.
2323
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002324- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002325
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002326- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2327 a string).
2328
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002329- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2330
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002331- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2332
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002333- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2334
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002335- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2336
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002337- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2338 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2339 list of fieldnames.
2340
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002341- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2342 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2343
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002344- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2345
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002346- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2347 empty lists.
2348
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002349- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2350 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2351 and shelves.
2352
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002353- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2354 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2355
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002356- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002357 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2358 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002359
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002360- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2361 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002362 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002363
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002364- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002365 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2366 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2367
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002368- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2369 and removed in Py2.4.
2370
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002371- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2372
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002373- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2374
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002375Tools/Demos
2376-----------
2377
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002378- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2379 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2380
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002381- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2382
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002383- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2384 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2385 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2386 destination in situations where both files are given.
2387
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002388- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2389 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2390 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2391 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2392
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002393- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2394
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002395- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2396 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2397 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2398 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2399 now.
2400
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002401- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2402 in effect
2403
2404- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2405 C-c C-h
2406
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002407- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2408 -d option was given.
2409
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002410Build
2411-----
2412
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002413- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2414 build under OS X.
2415
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002416- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2417 --enable-profiling.
2418
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002419- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2420 is configured --with-tsc.
2421
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002422- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2423 on AMD64.
2424
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002425- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2426 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2427
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002428- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2429 removed.
2430
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002431- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2432 supported (see PEP 11).
2433
2434- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2435
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002436- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2437
2438- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2439 (see PEP 11).
2440
2441- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2442 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2443
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002444C API
2445-----
2446
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002447- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2448 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2449 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2450
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002451- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2452 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2453 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2454 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2455
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002456- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2457 generator objects.
2458
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002459- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2460 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002461 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2462 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002463
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002464- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2465 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2466
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002467- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2468 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2469 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2470 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2471 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2472
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002473- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2474 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2475 about 10% faster.
2476
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002477- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2478 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2479
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002480- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2481 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2482 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2483 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2484
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002485Windows
2486-------
2487
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002488- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2489 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2490 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2491 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2492
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002493- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2494 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2495 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2496
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002497
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002498What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2499===============================
2500
2501*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2502
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002503IDLE
2504----
2505
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002506- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2507 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2508 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2509 context-menu actions.
2510
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002511- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2512 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2513 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2514 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2515 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2516 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2517 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2518 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2519 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2520
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002521
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002522What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2523=============================================
2524
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002525*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002526
2527Core and builtins
2528-----------------
2529
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002530- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002531 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002532 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2533
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002534Extension modules
2535-----------------
2536
2537- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2538 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2539 than once. This has been fixed.
2540
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002541- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2542 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2543 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2544 call.
2545
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002546- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2547
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002548Library
2549-------
2550
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002551- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2552 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2553
2554- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2555 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2556 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2557 restored.
2558
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002559IDLE
2560----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002561
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002562- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002563
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002564Build
2565-----
2566
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002567- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2568 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2569
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002570C API
2571-----
2572
2573Windows
2574-------
2575
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002576- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2577 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2578
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002579- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2580
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002581Mac
2582---
2583
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002584- Various fixes to pimp.
2585
2586- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2587
2588- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2589 more problems than it solves.
2590
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002591
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002592What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2593=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002594
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002595*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2596
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002597Core and builtins
2598-----------------
2599
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002600- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2601 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2602
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002603- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2604 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002605 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002606
2607- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2608 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2609 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002610 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002611
2612- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2613 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002614
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002615- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2616 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2617 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2618
2619- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002620 770247.
2621
2622- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002623
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002624Extension modules
2625-----------------
2626
2627- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2628 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2629
2630- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2631
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002632- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2633
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002634- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2635 contained within the _strptime module.
2636
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002637- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2638 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2639
2640- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002641 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2642
2643- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2644 the find_class attribute, if present.
2645
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002646- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002647
2648 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2649 (SF bug 763298).
2650
2651 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002652 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2653 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2654 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002655
2656 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2657
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002658Library
2659-------
2660
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002661- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2662
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002663- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2664 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2665 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2666 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2667 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2668 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2669 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2670 or Tester().
2671
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002672- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2673 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2674 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2675 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2676 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2677 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2678 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2679 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2680 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002681
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002682 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002683
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002684- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2685 weren't before was an oversight.
2686
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002687- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2688 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2689
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002690- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2691 when there are no lines.
2692
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002693- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2694 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2695
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002696- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2697 to child processes.
2698
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002699- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2700
2701- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2702
2703- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2704 xmlrpclib.
2705
2706- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2707 responses.
2708
2709- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2710 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2711
2712- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2713 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2714 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2715
2716- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2717 used as patterns.
2718
2719- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2720 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2721 than Tk 8.3.
2722
2723- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2724
2725- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002726
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002727Tools/Demos
2728-----------
2729
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002730- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2731
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002732- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2733
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002734- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002735
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002736Build
2737-----
2738
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002739- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2740
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002741- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2742
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002743- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2744 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002745
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002746- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2747 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2748 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002749
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002750C API
2751-----
2752
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002753- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2754 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2755
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002756Windows
2757-------
2758
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002759- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2760 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2761 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2762 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2763 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2764 Python exception ::
2765
2766 thread.error: can't start new thread
2767
2768 is raised now.
2769
2770- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2771 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2772 instead of from DLL teardown.
2773
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002774Mac
2775---
2776
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002777- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002778 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002779 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2780 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2781 the executable in the bundle.
2782
2783- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002784
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002785- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2786
2787- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2788 on Panther.
2789
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002790What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2791================================
2792
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002793*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002794
2795Core and builtins
2796-----------------
2797
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002798- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2799 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2800 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2801 with the -i option.
2802
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002803- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2804 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2805
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002806- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2807 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2808
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002809- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2810 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2811 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2812 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2813 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2814 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2815 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2816 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2817 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2818 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2819 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2820 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2821 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002822
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002823- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2824 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2825 embedded in a lambda expression.
2826
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002827- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2828 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2829 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2830 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2831 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2832
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002833- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2834 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2835 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2836
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002837- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2838 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2839
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002840- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2841 It's writable again.
2842
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002843- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2844 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2845 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002846 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002847
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002848- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2849 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2850 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2851
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002852Extension modules
2853-----------------
2854
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002855- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2856 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2857
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002858- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2859 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2860 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2861 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2862
2863- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2864 collection.
2865
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002866- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2867 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2868 unique within a single program run.
2869
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002870- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2871 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2872
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002873- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2874 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2875
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002876- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2877 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002878
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002879- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2880
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002881- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2882 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2883
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002884- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2885 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2886 for many BSD-derived systems.
2887
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002888
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002889Library
2890-------
2891
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002892- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2893 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2894 primary ones:
2895
2896 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2897 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2898 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2899
2900 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2901 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2902 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2903 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2904 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2905 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2906
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002907- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2908 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2909 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2910 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2911 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2912 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2913 argument.
2914
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002915- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2916 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2917 in the archive.
2918
2919- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2920 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2921
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002922- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2923 569574).
2924
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002925- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2926 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2927 no more.
2928
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002929- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2930 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2931 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2932 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2933 code coverage.
2934
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002935- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2936 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2937 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002938 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2939 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002940
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002941- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2942 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2943 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002944 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002945
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002946- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2947
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002948- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2949 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2950 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2951 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2952
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002953- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2954 handling.
2955
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002956- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2957 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2958
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002959- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2960 in socket.py.
2961
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002962- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2963
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002964- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2965 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2966 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2967 opener with proxy support.
2968
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002969- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2970
2971- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2972
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002973Tools/Demos
2974-----------
2975
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002976- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2977
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002978- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2979
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002980- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2981 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002982
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002983- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2984 files.
2985
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002986Build
2987-----
2988
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002989- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002990 different root directory.
2991
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002992C API
2993-----
2994
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002995- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2996 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2997 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2998 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2999 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
3000 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
3001 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
3002 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
3003 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
3004 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
3005
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00003006- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
3007 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
3008 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
3009 from Python.
3010
3011
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00003012New platforms
3013-------------
3014
3015None this time.
3016
3017Tests
3018-----
3019
3020- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
3021 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
3022
3023Windows
3024-------
3025
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00003026- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
3027
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00003028- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
3029 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
3030 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
3031 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
3032 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
3033 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
3034 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
3035 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
3036 that's what it's for.
3037
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00003038Mac
3039---
3040
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00003041- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
3042 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
3043 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
3044 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00003045- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
3046 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
3047- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00003048
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00003049SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
3050------------------------------------
3051
3052430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
3053598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
3054622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
3055661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
3056683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
3057697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
3058713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
3059724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
3060727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
3061729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
3062730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
3063731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
3064732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
3065733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
3066735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
3067740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
3068744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
3069745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
3070747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
3071749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
3072751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
3073753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
3074755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
3075757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
3076760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
3077
3078
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003079What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
3080================================
3081
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00003082*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003083
3084Core and builtins
3085-----------------
3086
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00003087- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
3088 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
3089
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00003090- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
3091 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
3092 and cannot be strings).
3093
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00003094- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
3095 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
3096 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
3097 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
3098
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00003099- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
3100 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
3101 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
3102 Python itself.
3103
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00003104- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
3105 the referenced object, if it has one.
3106
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00003107- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
3108 the thread started at
3109 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
3110
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00003111- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
3112 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
3113 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
3114 placed on a list index.
3115
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00003116- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
3117 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
3118 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
3119 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
3120
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003121- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
3122 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
3123 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
3124 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
3125 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
3126 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
3127 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
3128
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00003129- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
3130 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
3131 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
3132 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
3133 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
3134
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00003135- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
3136 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00003137
3138- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
3139 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
3140 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
3141 #693195.)
3142
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00003143- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
3144 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003145
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00003146- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00003147 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00003148 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
3149 interpreter executions, would fail.
3150
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00003151- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00003152 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00003153 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00003154
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003155Extension modules
3156-----------------
3157
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00003158- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
3159 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
3160 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
3161 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
3162
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00003163- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
3164 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
3165
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00003166- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
3167 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
3168 and Greg Chapman.)
3169
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003170- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
3171 recursively.
3172
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00003173- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00003174 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
3175 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
3176 leaks.
3177
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00003178- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
3179
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00003180- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
3181 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
3182 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
3183 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
3184 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
3185 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
3186 #705836.
3187
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00003188- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00003189 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
3190
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00003191- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
3192 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
3193 See SF bug #692416.
3194
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00003195- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
3196 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
3197
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00003198- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
3199 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
3200 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003201
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003202- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00003203 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
3204 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
3205
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00003206- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
3207 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
3208 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
3209 timeouts to work properly.
3210
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003211Library
3212-------
3213
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003214- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
3215 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
3216 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
3217 future release.
3218
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00003219- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
3220 for querying platform dependent features.
3221
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00003222- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00003223
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00003224- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
3225 pickle protocol versions.
3226
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00003227- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
3228 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
3229 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
3230
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00003231- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
3232
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00003233- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
3234 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
3235 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
3236 modules.
3237
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00003238- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
3239 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
3240 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
3241
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003242- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
3243 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
3244
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00003245- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
3246 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
3247 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
3248
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003249- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00003250 MS Office extensions.
3251
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00003252- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
3253 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
3254
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00003255- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
3256 execution speed of expressions and statements.
3257
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003258- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
3259 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
3260 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
3261 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
3262 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
3263 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
3264
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003265- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
3266 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
3267 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003268
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00003269- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
3270 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
3271 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
3272
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00003273- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
3274
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00003275- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
3276 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
3277 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
3278
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003279Tools/Demos
3280-----------
3281
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00003282- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3283 See the module docstring for details.
3284
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003285Build
3286-----
3287
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003288- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3289 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003290
3291C API
3292-----
3293
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003294- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3295
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003296- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3297 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3298 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3299
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003300- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3301 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003302
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003303 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3304 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3305 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003306
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003307- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003308 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3309
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003310- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3311 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3312 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003313
3314New platforms
3315-------------
3316
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003317None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003318
3319Tests
3320-----
3321
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003322- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3323 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003324
3325Windows
3326-------
3327
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003328- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3329 function.
3330
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003331- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3332 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003333
3334Mac
3335---
3336
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003337- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3338 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003339
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003340- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3341 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003342
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003343- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3344 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3345 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003346
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003347- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003348 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3349 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003350
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003351- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3352 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003353
3354
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003355What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3356=================================
3357
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003358*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003359
3360Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003361-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003362
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003363- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3364 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3365 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3366
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003367- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3368 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3369 (SF patch #664376.)
3370
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003371- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3372 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3373 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3374 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3375 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3376 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003377 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003378
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003379- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3380 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3381 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3382 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003383 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003384
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003385- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3386 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3387 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3388 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3389 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3390 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3391 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3392 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3393 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3394 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3395 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3396
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003397- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3398 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3399 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3400 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3401 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3402 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3403
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003404- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3405 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3406
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003407- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3408 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3409 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3410 case.)
3411
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003412- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3413 passed as unicode strings.
3414
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003415- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3416 See SF bug #683467.
3417
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003418- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3419 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3420
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003421- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3422
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003423- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3424
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003425- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3426 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3427 arguments.
3428
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003429- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3430 See SF bug #667147.
3431
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003432- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003433 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003434 See SF bug #676155.
3435
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003436- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003437 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003438 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3439 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3440 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3441 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3442 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3443 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003444
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003445Extension modules
3446-----------------
3447
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003448- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3449 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3450 tp_as_number pointer.
3451
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003452- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3453 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3454 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3455 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3456 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3457
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003458- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3459
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003460- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3461
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003462- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003463 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003464 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3465 patch #678531.)
3466
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003467- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3468 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3469
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003470- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3471 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3472
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003473- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3474
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003475- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3476 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3477 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3478
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003479- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3480
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003481- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3482 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3483
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003484- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003485
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003486- datetime changes:
3487
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003488 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3489
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003490 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3491 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3492 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3493 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3494 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3495 now.
3496
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003497 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003498 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3499 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003500
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003501 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003502 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003503 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3504 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3505 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3506 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003507
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003508 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3509 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3510 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003511 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3512
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003513 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3514 by a later example coded by Guido.
3515
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003516 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003517 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3518 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3519 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003520 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3521 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3522
3523 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3524 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3525 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3526 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3527 tzinfo subclass instance.
3528
3529 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3530 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3531 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3532 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3533 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3534 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3535 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3536 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003537
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003538 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3539 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3540 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3541 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3542 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003543 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3544
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003545 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003546
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003547 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3548 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3549 as a naive datetime object.
3550
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003551 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3552 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3553 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3554
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003555 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3556 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3557 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3558 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3559 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3560 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3561 comparison.
3562
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003563 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3564 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3565 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3566 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003567 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003568
3569 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003570
3571 and ::
3572
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003573 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3574
3575 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3576 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3577 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3578 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3579
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003580 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3581 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3582 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3583 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3584 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3585
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003586 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3587 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003588 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3589 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003590
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003591Library
3592-------
3593
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003594- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3595 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3596
3597- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3598 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3599 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3600 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3601 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3602 See PEP 307 for details.
3603
3604- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3605 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3606
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003607- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3608 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003609 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003610 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3611 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003612 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003613
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003614- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3615 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3616
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003617- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3618 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3619 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3620
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003621- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3622
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003623- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3624 exception.
3625
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003626- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3627 class.
3628
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003629- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3630 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3631 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3632
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003633- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3634 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3635
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003636- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003637 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3638 See SF bug #659228.
3639
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003640- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3641 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3642 See SF patch #651082.
3643
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003644- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003645
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003646- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3647 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3648
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003649- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003650 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003651
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003652- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3653 DOS paths from other platforms.
3654
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003655Tools/Demos
3656-----------
3657
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003658- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3659 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3660 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3661 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3662 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3663 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3664 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3665 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3666 example:
3667
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003668 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3669 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003670
3671 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3672
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003673
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003674Build
3675-----
3676
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003677- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3678 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3679 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003680 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3681
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003682 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3683
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003684- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3685 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3686 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3687 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3688 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3689 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3690 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3691 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3692 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3693
3694- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3695 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3696 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3697 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3698
3699- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3700 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3701
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003702C API
3703-----
3704
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003705- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3706 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003707
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003708- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3709 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3710 tp_as_number pointer.
3711
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003712- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3713 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3714 (SF #681367)
3715
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003716- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3717 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3718 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3719 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003720
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003721Tests
3722-----
3723
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003724- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003725 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3726 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3727 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3728 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3729 pydoc.)
3730
3731- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3732
3733- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003734
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003735Windows
3736-------
3737
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003738- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3739 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3740 time).
3741
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003742- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3743 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3744
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003745- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3746 release without strong cryptography.
3747
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003748- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003749 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003750
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003751- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3752 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3753
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003754Mac
3755---
3756
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003757- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3758 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003759
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003760- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3761 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3762 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003763
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003764- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3765 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003766
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003767- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3768 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3769 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3770 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003771
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003772- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003773 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3774 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3775 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003776
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003777
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003778What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003779=================================
3780
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003781*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003782
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003783Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003784--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003785
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003786- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3787
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003788- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3789 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003790 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003791 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003792 a different meaning than before.
3793
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003794- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003795 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003796 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003797
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003798- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003799 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003800 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003801
3802- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3803 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3804 and deallocation.
3805
3806- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3807 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3808
3809- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3810 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3811 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3812 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3813 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3814
3815- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3816 now detected by the garbage collector.
3817
3818- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3819 [SF bug 519621]
3820
3821- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3822 identifier.
3823
3824- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3825 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3826 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3827 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3828 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3829 [SF bug 563060]
3830
3831- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3832 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3833 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3834 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3835 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3836
3837- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3838 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3839 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3840
3841- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3842
3843- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3844 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3845 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3846 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3847 state of the slots would be lost.)
3848
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003849Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003850-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003851
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003852- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003853 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3854 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3855 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3856 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003857 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3858 Jython 2.1.
3859
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003860- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003861 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003862 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3863 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3864 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3865 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3866 these, see PEP 302.
3867
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003868- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3869 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3870 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3871
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003872- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3873 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3874 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3875
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003876- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3877 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3878 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3879
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003880- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3881 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3882 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3883 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3884 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3885 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3886 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3887 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3888 releases or implementations.
3889
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003890- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003891 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3892 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003893
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003894- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3895 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3896
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003897- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3898 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3899 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3900
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003901- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3902 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3903
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003904- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3905 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003906 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3907 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003908
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003909- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3910 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3911 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3912 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3913 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3914
3915 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3916 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3917 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3918 pattern.
3919
3920 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3921 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3922 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3923 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3924
3925 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3926 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3927 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3928 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3929 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3930 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3931
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003932- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3933 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3934 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3935 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3936 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3937 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3938 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3939 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003940
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003941- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3942 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3943 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3944 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3945 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003946 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3947 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3948 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3949 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3950 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3951 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3952 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003953
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003954- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3955 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3956
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003957- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3958 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3959 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3960 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3961 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3962 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3963 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3964 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3965 to Zack Weinberg!
3966
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003967- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3968 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3969 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3970 type. This has been fixed now.
3971
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003972- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3973 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3974 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3975
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003976- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3977 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3978 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3979 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3980 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3981 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3982 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3983 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003984 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003985
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003986- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3987 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3988 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003989
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003990- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3991 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3992 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3993 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3994 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3995 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3996 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3997 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003998 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003999 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
4000 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
4001
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00004002- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
4003 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
4004 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
4005 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
4006 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
4007 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
4008 this.)
4009
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00004010- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
4011 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004012 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00004013 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00004014 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
4015 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00004016 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
4017 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00004018
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00004019- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
4020 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
4021 currently running.
4022
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00004023- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
4024 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
4025 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
4026 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
4027
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00004028- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
4029 as directory names.
4030
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00004031- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
4032 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
4033
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00004034- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
4035 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
4036
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00004037- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00004038 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
4039 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00004040
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00004041- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
4042 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
4043 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
4044 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
4045 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
4046
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004047- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
4048 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
4049 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
4050 removed.
4051
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00004052- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
4053 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
4054 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
4055
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00004056- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
4057 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
4058 to __debug__.
4059
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00004060- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
4061 string to the left with zeros. For example,
4062 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
4063
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00004064- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
4065 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
4066 deprecated now.
4067
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00004068- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
4069 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
4070 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00004071
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00004072- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
4073 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
4074 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
4075 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
4076 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00004077
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00004078- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
4079 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
4080
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00004081- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
4082 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
4083 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004084 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00004085 is backward compatible.
4086
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00004087- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
4088 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
4089 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
4090 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
4091 could access a pointer to freed memory.
4092
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00004093- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
4094 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
4095 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
4096 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
4097 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
4098 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004099
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00004100- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
4101 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
4102
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004103- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
4104 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
4105
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004106- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
4107 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
4108 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
4109 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
4110 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
4111
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00004112- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
4113 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
4114 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
4115
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004116- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00004117 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
4118
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00004119- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
4120 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
4121 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00004122
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00004123- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
4124 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
4125
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00004126- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
4127 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
4128 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
4129
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00004130- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
4131
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004132Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004133-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004134
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00004135- Added three operators to the operator module:
4136 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
4137 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
4138 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
4139
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00004140- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
4141
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00004142- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
4143 archives.
4144
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004145- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
4146 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
4147 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
4148
4149 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
4150
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00004151- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
4152 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
4153 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00004154 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00004155
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00004156- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
4157 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
4158 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
4159 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00004160 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
4161 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
4162 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
4163 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00004164
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00004165- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
4166 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00004167
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00004168- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
4169
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00004170- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
4171 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
4172
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00004173- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
4174 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
4175 supported.
4176
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00004177- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
4178
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00004179- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
4180 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00004181
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00004182- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
4183 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
4184
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00004185- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
4186
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004187- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
4188 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
4189
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00004190- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
4191 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
4192 functions but callable type objects.
4193
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004194- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004195 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004196 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004197
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00004198- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
4199 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00004200
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00004201- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
4202 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00004203
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00004204- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
4205 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
4206 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
4207 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
4208
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00004209- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
4210 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00004211
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00004212- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
4213 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
4214 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
4215 and __imul__.
4216
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00004217- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00004218 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
4219 is called.
4220
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00004221- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
4222 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
4223 interpreter was compiled.
4224
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004225- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
4226 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
4227 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004228 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004229 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
4230 1, not 2.
4231
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00004232- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
4233 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
4234 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
4235 limit.
4236
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00004237- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
4238 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
4239 bug #623464.
4240
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00004241- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
4242 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
4243 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
4244 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
4245
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004246Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004247-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004248
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00004249- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
4250
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00004251- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
4252 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
4253 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
4254 with Python 2.3a2.
4255
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00004256- os.path exposes getctime.
4257
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004258- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004259 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004260 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004261 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004262 unit tests of floating point results.
4263
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00004264- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
4265 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
4266 has been increased.
4267
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00004268- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
4269 executed.
4270
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00004271- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
4272 postinstallation script.
4273
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00004274- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
4275 test the current module.
4276
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004277- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00004278 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
4279 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
4280 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
4281 this behavior needs to be controlled.
4282
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004283- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004284 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004285 Ward's Optik package.
4286
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004287- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4288 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4289 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4290 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4291
4292- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4293 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004294 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004295
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004296- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4297 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4298 shelf are binary pickles.
4299
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004300- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4301 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4302
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004303- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4304 modules are iterators now.
4305
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004306- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4307 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4308 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4309 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4310 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4311 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004312
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004313- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4314 with their entity value.
4315
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004316- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4317
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004318- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4319 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004320
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004321- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4322 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004323 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004324
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004325- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4326 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4327 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4328 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4329 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4330 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4331 main():
4332
4333 import locale
4334 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4335
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004336- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4337 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4338
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004339- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4340 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4341 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4342 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4343 to the new standard.
4344
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004345- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4346 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4347 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4348 an extension to the database.
4349
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004350- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4351 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4352 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4353 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004354 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004355
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004356- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004357 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004358
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004359- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4360 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4361 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4362 bounded integers.
4363
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004364- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4365 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4366 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4367 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4368 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4369 in existence.
4370
4371 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4372 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4373 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4374 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4375 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4376 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4377
4378 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4379 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4380 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4381 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4382
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004383- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4384 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4385 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4386
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004387- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4388
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004389- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4390 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4391 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4392 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4393
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004394- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4395 argument.
4396
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004397- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4398 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4399 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4400 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4401 [SF patch 560794].
4402
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004403- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4404 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4405 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004406 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4407 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4408 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004409
4410- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4411 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004412
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004413- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4414 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4415 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4416 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004417
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004418- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4419 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4420 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4421 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4422 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4423
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004424- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004425
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004426- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4427
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004428- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4429 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4430 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4431 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4432 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4433 identical to None.
4434
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004435- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4436 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4437 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4438 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4439 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4440 results now.
4441
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004442- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4443 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4444
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004445- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4446 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4447 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4448 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4449 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4450 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4451 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4452 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4453
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004454- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4455
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004456- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4457 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4458
4459- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4460 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4461 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4462 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4463 and other systems.
4464
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004465- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4466 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4467 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4468 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 +00004469 work well with these.
4470
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004471- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4472
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004473- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004474 connections.
4475
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004476- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4477 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4478 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4479
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004480- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4481 sets
4482
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004483- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4484 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4485 name.
4486
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004487- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4488 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4489 passed in.
4490
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004491- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004492 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004493 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4494 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004495
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004496- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4497
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004498- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4499
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004500- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4501 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4502 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4503
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004504- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4505 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4506 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4507 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004508 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004509
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004510- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004511 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004512 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004513
4514- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4515 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4516 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4517
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004518- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004519 the value of its expression argument.
4520
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004521- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4522 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4523 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4524
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004525- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4526 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4527 skipstone browser was included.
4528
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004529- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4530 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4531
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004532Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004533-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004534
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004535- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4536 names in addition to accepting file names.
4537
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004538- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4539 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4540 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4541 still used and useful.)
4542
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004543- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4544 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4545 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4546 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004547
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004548- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4549 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4550 the generated binary.
4551
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004552Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004553-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004554
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004555- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4556
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004557- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4558 except in the hands of experts.
4559
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004560- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004561 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4562 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4563 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004564
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004565- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4566 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4567 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4568 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4569 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4570 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4571 builds.
4572
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004573- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4574 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4575 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4576 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4577 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4578 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4579 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4580 new type.
4581
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004582- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004583
4584 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4585 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4586 positive infinities.
4587
4588 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4589 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4590 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4591 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4592 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4593 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4594 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4595
4596 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4597
4598 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4599
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004600- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4601 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4602 size of the executable.
4603
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004604- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4605 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4606 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4607 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004608
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004609- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4610
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004611- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4612 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4613 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004614
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004615- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4616 well as Unix.
4617
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004618- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4619 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4620 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4621 modules in the README file for details.
4622
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004623C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004624-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004625
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004626- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4627 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004628 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004629 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004630 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004631
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004632- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4633 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4634 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4635 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4636 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4637 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004638 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004639 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4640 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4641 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4642 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4643 aligned.)
4644
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004645- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4646 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4647 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4648
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004649- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4650 level.
4651
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004652- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4653 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4654 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4655 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4656 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4657
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004658- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4659 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4660 code.
4661
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004662- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4663 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4664 adjusting for negative indices.
4665
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004666- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4667 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4668 object.
4669
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004670- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4671 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4672 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4673
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004674- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4675 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004676
4677- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4678
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004679- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4680 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4681 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4682 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4683
4684- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4685
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004686- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004687
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004688- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004689 without going through the buffer API.
4690
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004691- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004692
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004693- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4694 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4695 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4696 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4697
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004698- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4699 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4700
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004701- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004702 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4703
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004704New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004705-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004706
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004707- OpenVMS is now supported.
4708
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004709- AtheOS is now supported.
4710
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004711- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4712
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004713- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4714
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004715Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004716-----
4717
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004718- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4719 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4720 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004721
4722Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004723-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004724
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004725- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4726 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4727 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4728 bugs.
4729 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004730 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004731 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4732 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004733 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004734
4735- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004736 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004737
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004738- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4739 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4740
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004741- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4742 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004743 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004744 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4745
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004746- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4747 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4748 use files" uninstall option).
4749
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004750- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4751
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004752- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4753 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4754
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004755- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4756 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4757 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4758
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004759- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4760 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4761 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4762 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4763 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004764 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4765 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4766 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004767
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004768- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004769 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004770 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4771 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4772 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4773 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4774 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4775 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4776 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4777 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4778 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4779 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4780 work around.
4781
4782- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4783 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4784 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4785 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4786 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4787 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4788 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4789 specified with O_CREAT too).
4790
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004791Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004792----
4793
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004794- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004795
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004796- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4797 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4798 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4799
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004800- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4801 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4802 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4803
4804- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4805 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4806 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4807 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4808 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4809 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4810 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4811 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004812
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004813- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4814 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4815 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004816
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004817- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4818 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4819 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4820 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4821 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004822
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004823- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4824 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4825 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004826
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004827- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4828 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004829
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004830- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4831 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4832 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4833 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4834 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004835
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004836- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4837 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4838 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4839
4840- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4841 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4842 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004843
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004844- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4845 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4846 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4847 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004848 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004849
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004850- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4851 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004852
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004853- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4854 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004855
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004856- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004857 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004858 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4859 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004860
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004861
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004862What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004863===============================
4864
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004865*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4866
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004867Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004868--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004869
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004870- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4871 with a custom metaclass.
4872
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004873Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004874-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004875
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004876- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4877 are proxies.
4878
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004879Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004880-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004881
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004882- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4883 very short strings.
4884
4885- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4886 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4887 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4888 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4889 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4890
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004891Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004892-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004893
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004894- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4895 close or delete time).
4896
4897- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4898 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4899
4900- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4901
4902- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004903 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004904
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004905Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004906-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004907
4908Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004909-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004910
4911C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004912-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004913
4914New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004915-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004916
4917Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004918-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004919
4920Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004921-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004922
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004923- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4924
4925- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4926 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4927
4928- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4929 deleted at process exit time.
4930
4931- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4932 in backslash.
4933
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004934Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004935----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004936
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004937- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4938 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4939 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4940
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004941
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004942What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004943===========================
4944
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004945*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4946
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004947Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004948--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004949
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004950- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4951 been extensively updated. See
4952
4953 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4954
4955 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4956
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004957- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4958 deleted!
4959
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004960- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4961 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4962 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4963 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4964 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4965
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004966- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4967
4968 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4969 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4970
4971 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4972 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4973 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4974 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4975 supported anyway.
4976
4977 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4978 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4979
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004980- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4981 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4982 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4983 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4984 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004985
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004986- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4987 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4988 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4989
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004990Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004991-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004992
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004993- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4994 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4995 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4996 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4997 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4998 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004999 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
5000 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
5001 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
5002 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005003
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00005004- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
5005 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
5006 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
5007
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005008Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005009-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005010
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005011- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
5012
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005013Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005014-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005015
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00005016- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
5017 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
5018 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
5019 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
5020 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
5021 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
5022
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00005023- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
5024
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00005025- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
5026
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00005027- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
5028
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00005029- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
5030 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
5031 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
5032
5033- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
5034
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005035Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005036-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005037
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00005038- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
5039 off a search on Google.
5040
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005041Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005042-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005043
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00005044- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
5045 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
5046 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
5047 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
5048 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
5049 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
5050 other platforms should do likewise.
5051
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00005052- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
5053 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
5054 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
5055
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005056C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005057-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005058
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00005059- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
5060 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
5061 producing key-value pairs.
5062
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00005063- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00005064 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00005065 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
5066 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
5067 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
5068 previously went unchallenged.
5069
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005070New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005071-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005072
5073Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005074-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005075
5076Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005077-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005078
5079Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005080----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005081
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00005082- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
5083 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005084
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00005085- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
5086 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
5087 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
5088 home.
5089
5090
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005091What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005092===========================
5093
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005094*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
5095
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005096Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005097--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005098
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00005099- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
5100 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00005101
5102 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00005103 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00005104
5105 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
5106 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005107 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00005108 This needs to be documented.
5109
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00005110- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
5111 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
5112
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00005113- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
5114 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
5115 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
5116
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00005117- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
5118 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
5119
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005120- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
5121 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
5122 class forbids it).
5123
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00005124- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
5125 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
5126 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
5127
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005128- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
5129
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005130Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005131-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005132
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00005133- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
5134 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005135 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00005136
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005137- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
5138 (like 1 + '').
5139
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005140Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005141-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005142
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005143- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
5144 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
5145 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
5146 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005147 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005148 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
5149
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00005150- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
5151 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
5152 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
5153 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
5154
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005155- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
5156 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005157 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
5158 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
5159 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005160
5161- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
5162 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005163
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00005164- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
5165 bytes on its input.
5166
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005167Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005168-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005169
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005170- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00005171 convenience function.
5172
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005173- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
5174 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
5175 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005176 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
5177 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
5178 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
5179 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
5180 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
5181 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005182
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00005183- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
5184 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
5185 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
5186 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
5187
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00005188- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
5189 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
5190 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
5191
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005192- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
5193 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
5194 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
5195 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
5196
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005197- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
5198 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005199 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005200 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
5201 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
5202 new -l and -e options.
5203
5204- statcache is now deprecated.
5205
5206- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
5207 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005208 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005209 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
5210 time properly taken into account.
5211
5212- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
5213 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
5214 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
5215 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
5216
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005217Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005218-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005219
5220Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005221-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005222
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005223- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
5224 is built with libdb3 if available.
5225
5226- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
5227
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005228C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005229-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005230
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00005231- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
5232 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
5233 PySequence_Size().
5234
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005235- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
5236
5237- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
5238 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
5239 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
5240
5241- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
5242 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
5243
5244- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
5245 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
5246
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005247New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005248-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005249
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005250- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
5251 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
5252
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00005253- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
5254 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
5255
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005256- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
5257
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005258Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005259-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005260
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005261- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
5262 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
5263
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005264Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005265-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005266
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005267Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005268----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005269
5270- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
5271 removed completely in the next release.
5272
5273- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
5274 OSX.
5275
5276- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
5277 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
5278
5279- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
5280
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005281
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005282What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005283===========================
5284
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005285*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5286
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005287Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005288--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005289
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005290- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005291 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005292 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005293 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5294 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005295 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5296 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005297 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5298 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005299
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005300- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5301 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5302
5303- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5304 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5305
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005306Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005307-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005308
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005309- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5310 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5311 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5312 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5313 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5314 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5315 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5316 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5317
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005318- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5319 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5320 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5321 example).
5322
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005323- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005324 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005325 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005326 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005327
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005328- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5329 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5330 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005331 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005332
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005333- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5334 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5335 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5336 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5337 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5338 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5339
5340 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5341
5342 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5343
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005344Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005345-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005346
5347- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5348
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005349- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5350
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005351- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5352 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005353
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005354- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5355 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5356 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5357 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5358 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5359 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005360 attributes.
5361
5362- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5363 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5364 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005365
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005366- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5367 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5368 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005369
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005370- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5371 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5372 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005373 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5374 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5375
5376- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5377 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005378
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005379Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005380-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005381
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005382- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5383 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5384
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005385- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5386 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5387 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5388 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5389
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005390- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5391 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5392 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5393 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5394
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005395 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5396 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5397 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5398 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5399 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5400 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5401 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5402 without losing information).
5403
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005404- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005405 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5406 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5407 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5408 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5409 module).
5410
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005411 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005412 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5413 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5414 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5415 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005416
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005417- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005418 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5419 encoding.
5420
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005421- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5422 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5423
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005424- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005425 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5426
5427- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5428 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5429 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5430 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5431
5432- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5433
5434- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5435 ON, and OFF.
5436
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005437- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5438 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5439
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005440Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005441-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005442
5443- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5444 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5445 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005446
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005447- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5448 been added: -X and -E.
5449
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005450Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005451-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005452
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005453- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5454 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5455
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005456C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005457-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005458
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005459- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5460 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5461 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5462 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5463 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5464
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005465- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5466 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5467 as long) arguments.
5468
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005469- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5470 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5471 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5472 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5473 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5474 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5475
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005476- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5477 input.
5478
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005479New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005480-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005481
5482Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005483-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005484
5485Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005486-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005487
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005488- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5489 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5490 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5491
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005492- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5493 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5494 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005495 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005496
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005497 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5498 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5499 import signal
5500 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005501
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005502 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005503 while 1:
5504 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005505 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005506 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5507 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5508 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5509 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005510
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005511
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005512What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5513===========================
5514
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005515*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5516
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005517Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005518--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005519
5520- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5521 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5522 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5523
5524- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5525 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5526 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5527 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5528 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5529 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5530 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005531
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005532- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005533 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005534 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5535 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5536 associate a docstring with a property.
5537
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005538- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5539 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5540 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5541 other built-in object types.
5542
5543- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5544 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5545 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5546 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5547 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5548
5549- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5550 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5551
5552- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5553 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005554 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005555 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5556 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5557 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5558 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5559 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5560
5561- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5562 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5563 class.
5564
5565- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5566 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5567 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5568 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5569
5570- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5571 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5572 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5573 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5574
5575- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5576 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5577
5578- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5579 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5580 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5581 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5582 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005583 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005584 with the same value as s.
5585
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005586- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5587
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005588Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005589----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005590
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005591- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5592
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005593- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5594 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5595 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5596 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5597 objects.
5598
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005599- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5600 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005601 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5602 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5603
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005604- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5605 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5606 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5607
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005608Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005609-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005610
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005611- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5612 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5613 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5614 by the instances.
5615
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005616- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5617 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5618 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5619
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005620- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5621 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5622 before the entire comparison is complete.
5623
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005624- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5625 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5626 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5627
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005628- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5629 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5630 getwriter().
5631
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005632- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5633 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5634
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005635- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005636 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5637 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5638
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005639- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5640 iterable object.
5641
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005642- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5643 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005644
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005645- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5646 authentication.
5647
5648- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5649 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005650
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005651- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005652 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5653 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5654 a sample driver.)
5655
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005656Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005657-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005658
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005659- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5660 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5661 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5662 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5663 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5664 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5665 kernel has large file support.
5666
5667- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5668 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5669 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5670 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5671 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5672
5673- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5674 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5675 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5676
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005677C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005678-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005679
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005680- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5681 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5682
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005683New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005684-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005685
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005686- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5687 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5688
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005689Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005690-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005691
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005692- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5693 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5694 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5695 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5696 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5697
5698- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5699 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5700 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5701 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5702
5703- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5704 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5705
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005706Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005707-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005708
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005709- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005710 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5711 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005712
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005713
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005714What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5715===========================
5716
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005717*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5718
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005719Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005720----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005721
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005722- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5723 big to represent as a C double.
5724
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005725- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5726 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5727 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5728 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5729 restriction).
5730
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005731- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5732 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5733 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5734 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5735 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5736
5737 >>> dir([])
5738 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5739 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5740 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5741 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5742 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5743 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5744 'reverse', 'sort']
5745
5746 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5747
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005748- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005749 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5750 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5751 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5752 OverflowError exception.
5753
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005754- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005755 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005756 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5757 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5758 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5759 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5760 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005761 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005762 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5763 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5764
5765 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5766 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5767 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5768 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005769
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005770- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005771 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5772 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5773 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5774 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5775 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5776 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5777 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5778 once it is created.
5779
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005780- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5781 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5782 (key, value) pairs.
5783
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005784- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005785 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5786 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5787
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005788- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5789 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5790 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5791 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5792 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005793
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005794- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005795 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5796 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5797
5798 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5799
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005800- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005801 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5802
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005803Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005804-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005805
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005806- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005807 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5808 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005809
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005810- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5811 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5812 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5813 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5814 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5815 in this area anymore).
5816
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005817- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5818 threading.Timer.
5819
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005820- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5821 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5822
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005823- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005824 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5825
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005826- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005827 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5828 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5829 converted to Python longs.
5830
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005831- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005832 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5833
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005834- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5835 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5836 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5837
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005838Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005839-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005840
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005841- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5842 division operators as per PEP 238.
5843
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005844Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005845-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005846
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005847- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5848 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5849 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5850 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5851
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005852C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005853-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005854
5855- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005856
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005857- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5858 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005859 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005860
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005861 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5862 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005863 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005864 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005865
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005866- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005867 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5868 module:
5869
5870 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005871
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005872 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5873 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005874
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005875 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5876 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005877
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005878 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5879
5880 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5881
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005882- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005883 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5884 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5885 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005886
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005887New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005888-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005889
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005890- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5891 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5892 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5893 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5894 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005895
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005896Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005897-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005898
5899Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005900-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005901
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005902- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5903 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5904 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5905 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005906 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5907 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5908 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5909 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5910 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005911
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005912- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005913 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5914
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005915
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005916What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5917===========================
5918
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005919*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5920
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005921Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005922-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005923
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005924- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5925 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5926
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005927- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5928 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5929 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005930
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005931- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5932 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5933 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5934 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005935
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005936- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5937
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005938- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005939
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005940Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005941-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005942
5943- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005944 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005945 the module docstring for details.
5946
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005947Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005948-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005949
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005950- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005951 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5952 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5953 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005954
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005955- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5956 Nick Mathewson.
5957
5958Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005959----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005960
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005961- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5962 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5963 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5964 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5965 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5966 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5967 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5968 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5969
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005970- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5971 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5972 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5973 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5974
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005975- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5976 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5977 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5978 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5979 come a long way).
5980
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005981- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5982 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5983 write filters for these warnings).
5984
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005985- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5986 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5987 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5988 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5989 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5990
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005991- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5992 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5993 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5994 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5995 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5996 older distribution.
5997
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005998Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005999-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00006000
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00006001- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
6002 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00006003 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00006004
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00006005- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
6006 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
6007 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
6008
6009- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
6010
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00006011- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
6012
6013- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
6014
6015- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
6016
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006017- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00006018
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00006019- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
6020
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00006021New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006022-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00006023
6024C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006025-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00006026
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00006027- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
6028 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
6029 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
6030 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
6031 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
6032 against buffer overruns.
6033
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00006034- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00006035 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
6036 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00006037 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
6038 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
6039 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
6040
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00006041- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
6042 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
6043 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
6044 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
6045 deprecated.
6046
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00006047Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006048-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00006049
6050- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
6051 relevant is found.
6052
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00006053
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00006054What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006055===========================
6056
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006057*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
6058
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006059Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006060----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006061
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00006062- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
6063 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
6064 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
6065 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
6066 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
6067 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
6068 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
6069 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006070 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00006071 repaired.
6072
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00006073- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00006074 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00006075 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
6076 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
6077 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
6078 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
6079 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
6080 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
6081 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
6082 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
6083
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00006084- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
6085 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
6086 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
6087 leading BMO character).
6088
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00006089- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
6090 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
6091 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
6092
6093 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
6094 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
6095 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006096
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00006097 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
6098 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
6099 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
6100 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
6101 for various simple to use conversions.
6102
6103 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
6104 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
6105
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006106 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6107 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
6108 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
6109 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
6110 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6111 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
6112 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6113 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
6114 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6115 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
6116 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6117 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
6118 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6119 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
6120 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00006121
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006122- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
6123 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
6124 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006125 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006126 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006127
6128 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006129 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
6130 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
6131 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
6132 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
6133 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006134 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
6135 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006136
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006137 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
6138 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
6139 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006140 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006141
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00006142- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
6143 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
6144 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
6145 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
6146 floating arithmetic,
6147
6148 x = 9007199254740992.0
6149 print long(x)
6150
6151 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
6152 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
6153 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
6154 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
6155 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
6156 functions are of good quality).
6157
6158 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
6159 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
6160 algorithms to break.
6161
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00006162- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
6163 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
6164 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
6165 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
6166 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
6167 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
6168 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
6169 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
6170 order.
6171
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006172- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
6173 operation along the most common code paths.
6174
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006175- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
6176 the same as dict.has_key(x).
6177
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00006178- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
6179 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
6180 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
6181 {}.update(UserDict())
6182
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006183- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
6184 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
6185 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
6186 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
6187 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
6188 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
6189 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
6190 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
6191
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006192- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00006193 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006194
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006195 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00006196 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
6197 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00006198 join() method of strings
6199 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006200 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
6201 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006202 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00006203 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006204
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00006205- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
6206 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
6207
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006208- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
6209 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
6210
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00006211- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
6212 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
6213 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
6214 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
6215
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006216- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
6217 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006218 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006219 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
6220 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00006221
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00006222- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
6223
6224
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006225Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006226-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006227
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006228- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006229 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006230 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
6231 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
6232
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00006233- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
6234 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
6235
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00006236- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
6237 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
6238 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
6239 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
6240
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00006241- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
6242 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
6243 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
6244
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00006245- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
6246
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00006247- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
6248
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00006249- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
6250 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
6251 that are still imported into string.py).
6252
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006253- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
6254
6255- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
6256 Now it does.
6257
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006258- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
6259
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006260- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
6261 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
6262 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
6263 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
6264 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006265 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
6266 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006267
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00006268- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
6269 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
6270 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
6271 'help(object)'.
6272
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006273Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006274-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006275
6276- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006277 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006278 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
6279 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
6280
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006281- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006282 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6283 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006284
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006285C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006286-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006287
6288- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6289 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006290
6291----
6292
6293**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**