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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000015- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000016 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000017
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000018- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000019 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000020 which was missing for no apparent reason.
21
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000022- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000023 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
24 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
25
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +000026- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
27 types that support garbage collection.
28
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +000029- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
30
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +000031- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
32 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
33 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
34 Jython.
35
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000036Extension modules
37-----------------
38
39Library
40-------
41
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +000042- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
43 GNU longname/longlink creation.
44
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +000045- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
46 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
47 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
48 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
49
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +000050- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
51 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
52
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +000053- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
54 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
55 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
56 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
57 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
58 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
59 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
60 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
61 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
62 by some other method in progress).
63
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000064- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
65 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
66 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +000067
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +000068- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
69
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +000070- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
71 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
72 AM Kuchling.
73
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +000074- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
75 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
76 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
77
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +000078- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
79 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
80 instead of unsigned.
81
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000082- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +000083 no longer part of the public API.
84
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +000085- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
86 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
87 string methods of the same name).
88
Andrew M. Kuchling64ed2982004-07-10 18:43:32 +000089- asyncore's dispatcher.set_reuse_addr() now works correctly on Windows.
90 SF patch 982681.
91
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000092- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +000093 SF patch 945642.
94
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +000095- doctest unittest integration improvements:
96
97 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
98
99 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
100 DocTestSuites.
101
102- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
103 that provide thread-local data.
104
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000105- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
106 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
107
108
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000109Tools/Demos
110-----------
111
112Build
113-----
114
115C API
116-----
117
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000118- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
119 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
120
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000121Documentation
122-------------
123
124Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
125
126 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
127 assigning thier values
128
129 - correct my missconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
130
131 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
132
133
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000134New platforms
135-------------
136
137Tests
138-----
139
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000140- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
141 platforms that use the Makefile.
142
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000143Windows
144-------
145
146Mac
147---
148
149
150
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000151What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
152=================================
153
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000154*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000155
156Core and builtins
157-----------------
158
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000159- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
160 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
161 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
162 objects now (one object instead of three).
163
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000164- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
165 Windows DLLs.
166
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000167- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval() now accepts any mapping type.
168
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000169- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
170 a new .pyc magic.
171
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000172- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
173 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
174 be there.
175
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000176- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
177 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
178 the LC_NUMERIC category.
179
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000180- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
181 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
182 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
183
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000184- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
185
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000186- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
187 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
188 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000189
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000190- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
191 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
192
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000193- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
194
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000195- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000196 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000197
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000198- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
199
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000200- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
201
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000202- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
203 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
204
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000205- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
206 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
207 Fixes bug #858016 .
208
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000209- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
210 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
211 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
212
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000213- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
214 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
215 improves their performance (about 35%).
216
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000217- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
218 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
219 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
220
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000221- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
222 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
223 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
224 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
225
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000226- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
227 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
228 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
229 length is not known).
230
231- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
232 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000233 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
234 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000235 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
236
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000237- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
238 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
239
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000240- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
241 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
242 keyword arguments.
243
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000244- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
245 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
246 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
247
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000248- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
249 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
250 cases.
251
252- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
253 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
254 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
255 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
256 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
257 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
258 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
259 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
260 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
261 a release build.
262
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000263- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
264 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
265
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000266- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000267 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000268
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000269- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
270 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
271 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
272 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
273 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
274 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
275 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
276 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
277 destroyed.
278
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000279- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
280 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
281 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
282 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
283 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
284 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
285 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
286 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
287
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000288- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
289 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
290 character other than a space.
291
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000292- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
293 by the function object or by the method object, the function
294 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
295 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
296 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
297 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
298 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
299 attributes with the same name.
300
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000301- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
302 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
303 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
304 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
305 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
306 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
307 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
308 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
309 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
310 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
311 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
312 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
313 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
314 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000315
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000316- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
317 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
318 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
319 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
320 This has been repaired.
321
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000322- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
323
324- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
325
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000326- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
327 over a sequence.
328
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000329- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000330 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000331
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000332- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
333
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000334- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
335 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
336 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
337 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
338 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
339 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
340 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
341 records with equal keys is unchanged).
342
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000343- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
344 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
345 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
346
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000347- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
348 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
349 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
350 freelist.
351
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000352- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
353 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
354
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000355- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
356 number.
357
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000358- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
359 a TypeError exception.
360
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000361- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
362 820195.
363
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000364- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
365 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
366 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
367
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000368- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000369 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
370 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000371
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000372- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
373 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
374 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
375
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000376- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
377 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000378 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000379
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000380- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000381 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
382 the first call.
383
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000384
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000385Extension modules
386-----------------
387
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000388- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
389 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
390
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000391- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
392 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
393 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
394 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
395 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
396 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
397 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000398
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000399- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
400
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000401- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
402
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000403- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
404 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
405
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000406- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
407 fewer false positives.
408
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000409- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
410 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
411
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000412- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000413 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
414
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000415- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000416 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000417 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
418 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
419 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000420
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000421- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
422 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
423 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
424 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
425
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000426- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
427 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
428 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
429 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
430 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
431 #897625.
432
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000433- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
434 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
435
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000436- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
437 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
438 and pops on either side of the deque.
439
440- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
441 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
442
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000443- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
444 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
445 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
446 other functions that expect a function argument.
447
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000448- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
449
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000450- os.getsid was added.
451
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000452- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
453 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
454 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
455
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000456- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
457
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000458- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
459
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000460- readline.clear_history was added.
461
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000462- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
463
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000464- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
465
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000466- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
467
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000468- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
469
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000470- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
471
472- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
473
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000474- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
475
476- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
477
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000478- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
479 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
480 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
481
482- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
483 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
484 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
485 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
486 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
487 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
488 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
489
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000490- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
491 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
492 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
493 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000494
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000495- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000496 iterators from a single iterable.
497
498- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
499 of raising a TypeError exception.
500
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000501- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
502 as parameter.
503
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000504Library
505-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000506
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000507- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
508 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
509 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000510
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000511- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
512 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
513 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000514
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000515- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000516
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000517- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
518 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000519
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000520- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
521 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
522
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000523- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
524
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000525- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000526 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000527
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000528- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
529 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
530
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000531- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
532
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000533- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
534 on cygwin and mingw32.
535
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000536- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
537
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000538- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
539 module.
540
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000541- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
542 installation scheme for all platforms.
543
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000544- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000545 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000546
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000547- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
548 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
549 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
550
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000551- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
552 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
553 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
554
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000555- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
556
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000557- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
558
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000559- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
560 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
561
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000562- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
563 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
564 type pattern with the same value exists.
565
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000566- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
567 when run from the command prompt).
568
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000569- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
570 not taken into consideration when caching value.
571
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000572- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
573 default sort).
574
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000575- Added global runctx function to profile module
576
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000577- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
578
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000579- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
580
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000581- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
582
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000583- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000584 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
585 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
586 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
587 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
588 accordingly.
589
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000590- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
591 decoding standards.
592
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000593- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
594 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
595 called for all requests.
596
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000597- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
598 they are passed to the compiler.
599
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000600- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
601 indent, width and depth.
602
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000603- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
604 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
605
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000606- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
607 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
608
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000609- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
610
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000611- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
612
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000613- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
614
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000615- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
616 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
617
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000618- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000619 for better performance.
620
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000621- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000622
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000623- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
624 a string).
625
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000626- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
627
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000628- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
629
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000630- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
631
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000632- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
633
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000634- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
635 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
636 list of fieldnames.
637
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000638- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
639 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
640
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000641- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
642
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000643- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
644 empty lists.
645
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000646- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
647 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
648 and shelves.
649
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000650- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
651 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
652
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000653- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000654 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
655 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000656
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000657- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
658 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000659 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000660
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000661- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000662 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
663 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
664
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000665- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
666 and removed in Py2.4.
667
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000668- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
669
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000670- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
671
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000672Tools/Demos
673-----------
674
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000675- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
676 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
677
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000678- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
679
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000680- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
681 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
682 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
683 destination in situations where both files are given.
684
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000685- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
686 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
687 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
688 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
689
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000690- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
691
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000692- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
693 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
694 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
695 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
696 now.
697
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000698- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
699 in effect
700
701- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
702 C-c C-h
703
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000704- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
705 -d option was given.
706
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000707Build
708-----
709
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000710- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
711 build under OS X.
712
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000713- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
714 --enable-profiling.
715
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000716- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
717 is configured --with-tsc.
718
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000719- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
720 on AMD64.
721
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000722- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
723 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
724
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000725- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
726 removed.
727
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000728- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
729 supported (see PEP 11).
730
731- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
732
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000733- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
734
735- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
736 (see PEP 11).
737
738- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
739 sizeof(char) must be 1.
740
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000741C API
742-----
743
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000744- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
745 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
746 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
747
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000748- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
749 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
750 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
751 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
752
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000753- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
754 generator objects.
755
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000756- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
757 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000758 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
759 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000760
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000761- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
762 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
763
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000764- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
765 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
766 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
767 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
768 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
769
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000770- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
771 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
772 about 10% faster.
773
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000774- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
775 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
776
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000777- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
778 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
779 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
780 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
781
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000782Windows
783-------
784
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000785- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
786 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
787 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
788 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
789
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000790- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
791 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
792 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
793
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000794
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000795What's New in Python 2.3 final?
796===============================
797
798*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
799
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000800IDLE
801----
802
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000803- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
804 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
805 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
806 context-menu actions.
807
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000808- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
809 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
810 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
811 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
812 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
813 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
814 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
815 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
816 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
817
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000818
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000819What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
820=============================================
821
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000822*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000823
824Core and builtins
825-----------------
826
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000827- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000828 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000829 comment at the end are still unsupported.
830
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000831Extension modules
832-----------------
833
834- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
835 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
836 than once. This has been fixed.
837
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000838- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
839 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
840 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
841 call.
842
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000843- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
844
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000845Library
846-------
847
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000848- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
849 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
850
851- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
852 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
853 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
854 restored.
855
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000856IDLE
857----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000858
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000859- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000860
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000861Build
862-----
863
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000864- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
865 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
866
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000867C API
868-----
869
870Windows
871-------
872
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000873- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
874 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
875
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000876- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
877
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000878Mac
879---
880
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000881- Various fixes to pimp.
882
883- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
884
885- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
886 more problems than it solves.
887
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000888
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000889What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
890=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000891
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000892*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
893
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000894Core and builtins
895-----------------
896
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000897- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
898 by sys.setcheckinterval().
899
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000900- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
901 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000902 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000903
904- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
905 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
906 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000907 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000908
909- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
910 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000911
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000912- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
913 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
914 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
915
916- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000917 770247.
918
919- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000920
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000921Extension modules
922-----------------
923
924- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
925 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
926
927- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
928
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000929- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
930
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000931- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
932 contained within the _strptime module.
933
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000934- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
935 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
936
937- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000938 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
939
940- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
941 the find_class attribute, if present.
942
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000943- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000944
945 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
946 (SF bug 763298).
947
948 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000949 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
950 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
951 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000952
953 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
954
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000955Library
956-------
957
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000958- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
959
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000960- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
961 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
962 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
963 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
964 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
965 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
966 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
967 or Tester().
968
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000969- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
970 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
971 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
972 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
973 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
974 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
975 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
976 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
977 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000978
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000979 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000980
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000981- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
982 weren't before was an oversight.
983
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000984- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
985 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
986
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000987- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
988 when there are no lines.
989
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000990- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
991 which could occur with Tk 8.4
992
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000993- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
994 to child processes.
995
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000996- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
997
998- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
999
1000- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1001 xmlrpclib.
1002
1003- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1004 responses.
1005
1006- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1007 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1008
1009- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1010 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1011 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1012
1013- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1014 used as patterns.
1015
1016- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1017 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1018 than Tk 8.3.
1019
1020- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1021
1022- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001023
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001024Tools/Demos
1025-----------
1026
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001027- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1028
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001029- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1030
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001031- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001032
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001033Build
1034-----
1035
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001036- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1037
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001038- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1039
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001040- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1041 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001042
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001043- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1044 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1045 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001046
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001047C API
1048-----
1049
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001050- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1051 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1052
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001053Windows
1054-------
1055
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001056- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1057 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1058 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1059 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1060 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1061 Python exception ::
1062
1063 thread.error: can't start new thread
1064
1065 is raised now.
1066
1067- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1068 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1069 instead of from DLL teardown.
1070
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001071Mac
1072---
1073
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001074- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001075 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001076 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1077 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1078 the executable in the bundle.
1079
1080- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001081
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001082- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1083
1084- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1085 on Panther.
1086
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001087What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1088================================
1089
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001090*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001091
1092Core and builtins
1093-----------------
1094
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001095- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1096 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1097 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1098 with the -i option.
1099
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001100- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1101 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1102
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001103- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1104 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1105
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001106- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1107 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1108 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1109 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1110 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1111 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1112 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1113 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1114 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1115 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1116 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1117 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1118 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001119
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001120- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1121 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1122 embedded in a lambda expression.
1123
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001124- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1125 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1126 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1127 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1128 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1129
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001130- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1131 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1132 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1133
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001134- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1135 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1136
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001137- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1138 It's writable again.
1139
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001140- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1141 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1142 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001143 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001144
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001145- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1146 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1147 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1148
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001149Extension modules
1150-----------------
1151
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001152- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1153 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1154
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001155- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1156 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1157 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1158 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1159
1160- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1161 collection.
1162
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001163- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1164 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1165 unique within a single program run.
1166
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001167- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1168 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1169
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001170- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1171 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1172
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001173- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1174 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001175
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001176- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1177
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001178- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1179 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1180
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001181- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1182 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1183 for many BSD-derived systems.
1184
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001185
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001186Library
1187-------
1188
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001189- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1190 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1191 primary ones:
1192
1193 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1194 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1195 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1196
1197 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1198 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1199 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1200 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1201 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1202 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1203
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001204- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1205 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1206 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1207 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1208 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1209 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1210 argument.
1211
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001212- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1213 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1214 in the archive.
1215
1216- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1217 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1218
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001219- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1220 569574).
1221
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001222- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1223 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1224 no more.
1225
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001226- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1227 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1228 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1229 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1230 code coverage.
1231
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001232- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1233 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1234 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001235 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1236 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001237
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001238- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1239 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1240 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001241 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001242
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001243- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1244
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001245- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1246 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1247 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1248 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1249
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001250- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1251 handling.
1252
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001253- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1254 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1255
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001256- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1257 in socket.py.
1258
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001259- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1260
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001261- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1262 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1263 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1264 opener with proxy support.
1265
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001266- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1267
1268- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1269
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001270Tools/Demos
1271-----------
1272
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001273- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1274
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001275- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1276
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001277- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1278 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001279
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001280- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1281 files.
1282
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001283Build
1284-----
1285
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001286- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001287 different root directory.
1288
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001289C API
1290-----
1291
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001292- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1293 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1294 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1295 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1296 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1297 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1298 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1299 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1300 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1301 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1302
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001303- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1304 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1305 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1306 from Python.
1307
1308
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001309New platforms
1310-------------
1311
1312None this time.
1313
1314Tests
1315-----
1316
1317- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1318 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1319
1320Windows
1321-------
1322
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001323- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1324
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001325- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1326 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1327 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1328 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1329 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1330 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1331 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1332 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1333 that's what it's for.
1334
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001335Mac
1336---
1337
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001338- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1339 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1340 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1341 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001342- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1343 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1344- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001345
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001346SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1347------------------------------------
1348
1349430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1350598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1351622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1352661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1353683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1354697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1355713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1356724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1357727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1358729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1359730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1360731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1361732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1362733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1363735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1364740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1365744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1366745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1367747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1368749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1369751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1370753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1371755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1372757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1373760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1374
1375
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001376What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1377================================
1378
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001379*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001380
1381Core and builtins
1382-----------------
1383
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001384- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1385 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1386
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001387- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1388 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1389 and cannot be strings).
1390
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001391- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1392 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1393 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1394 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1395
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001396- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1397 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1398 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1399 Python itself.
1400
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001401- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1402 the referenced object, if it has one.
1403
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001404- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1405 the thread started at
1406 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1407
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001408- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1409 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1410 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1411 placed on a list index.
1412
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001413- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1414 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1415 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1416 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1417
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001418- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1419 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1420 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1421 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1422 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1423 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1424 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1425
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001426- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1427 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1428 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1429 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1430 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1431
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001432- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1433 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001434
1435- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1436 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1437 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1438 #693195.)
1439
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001440- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1441 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001442
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001443- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001444 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001445 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1446 interpreter executions, would fail.
1447
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001448- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001449 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001450 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001451
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001452Extension modules
1453-----------------
1454
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001455- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1456 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1457 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1458 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1459
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001460- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1461 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1462
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001463- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1464 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1465 and Greg Chapman.)
1466
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001467- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1468 recursively.
1469
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001470- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001471 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1472 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1473 leaks.
1474
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001475- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1476
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001477- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1478 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1479 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1480 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1481 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1482 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1483 #705836.
1484
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001485- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001486 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1487
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001488- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1489 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1490 See SF bug #692416.
1491
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001492- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1493 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1494
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001495- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1496 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1497 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001498
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001499- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001500 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1501 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1502
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001503- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1504 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1505 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1506 timeouts to work properly.
1507
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001508Library
1509-------
1510
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001511- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1512 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1513 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1514 future release.
1515
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001516- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1517 for querying platform dependent features.
1518
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001519- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001520
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001521- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1522 pickle protocol versions.
1523
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001524- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1525 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1526 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1527
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001528- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1529
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001530- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1531 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1532 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1533 modules.
1534
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001535- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1536 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1537 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1538
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001539- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1540 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1541
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001542- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1543 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1544 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1545
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001546- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001547 MS Office extensions.
1548
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001549- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1550 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1551
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001552- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1553 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1554
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001555- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1556 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1557 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1558 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1559 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1560 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1561
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001562- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1563 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1564 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001565
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001566- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1567 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1568 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1569
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001570- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1571
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001572- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1573 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1574 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1575
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001576Tools/Demos
1577-----------
1578
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001579- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1580 See the module docstring for details.
1581
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001582Build
1583-----
1584
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001585- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1586 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001587
1588C API
1589-----
1590
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001591- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1592
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001593- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1594 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1595 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1596
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001597- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1598 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001599
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001600 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1601 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1602 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001603
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001604- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001605 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1606
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001607- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1608 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1609 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001610
1611New platforms
1612-------------
1613
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001614None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001615
1616Tests
1617-----
1618
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001619- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1620 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001621
1622Windows
1623-------
1624
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001625- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1626 function.
1627
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001628- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1629 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001630
1631Mac
1632---
1633
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001634- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1635 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001636
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001637- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1638 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001639
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001640- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1641 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1642 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001643
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001644- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001645 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1646 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001647
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001648- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1649 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001650
1651
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001652What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1653=================================
1654
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001655*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001656
1657Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001658-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001659
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001660- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1661 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1662 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1663
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001664- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1665 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1666 (SF patch #664376.)
1667
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001668- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1669 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1670 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1671 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1672 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1673 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001674 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001675
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001676- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1677 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1678 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1679 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001680 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001681
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001682- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1683 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1684 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1685 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1686 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1687 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1688 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1689 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1690 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1691 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1692 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1693
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001694- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1695 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1696 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1697 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1698 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1699 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1700
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001701- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1702 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1703
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001704- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1705 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1706 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1707 case.)
1708
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001709- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1710 passed as unicode strings.
1711
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001712- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1713 See SF bug #683467.
1714
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001715- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1716 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1717
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001718- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1719
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001720- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1721
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001722- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1723 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1724 arguments.
1725
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001726- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1727 See SF bug #667147.
1728
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001729- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001730 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001731 See SF bug #676155.
1732
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001733- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001734 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001735 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1736 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1737 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1738 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1739 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1740 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001741
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001742Extension modules
1743-----------------
1744
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001745- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1746 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1747 tp_as_number pointer.
1748
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001749- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1750 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1751 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1752 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1753 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1754
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001755- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1756
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001757- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1758
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001759- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001760 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001761 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1762 patch #678531.)
1763
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001764- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1765 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1766
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001767- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1768 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1769
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001770- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1771
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001772- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1773 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1774 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1775
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001776- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1777
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001778- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1779 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1780
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001781- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001782
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001783- datetime changes:
1784
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001785 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1786
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001787 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1788 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1789 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1790 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1791 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1792 now.
1793
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001794 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001795 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1796 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001797
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001798 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001799 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001800 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1801 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1802 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1803 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001804
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001805 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1806 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1807 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001808 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1809
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001810 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1811 by a later example coded by Guido.
1812
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001813 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001814 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1815 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1816 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001817 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1818 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1819
1820 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1821 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1822 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1823 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1824 tzinfo subclass instance.
1825
1826 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1827 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1828 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1829 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1830 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1831 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1832 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1833 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001834
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001835 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1836 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1837 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1838 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1839 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001840 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1841
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001842 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001843
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001844 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1845 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1846 as a naive datetime object.
1847
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001848 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1849 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1850 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1851
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001852 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1853 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1854 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1855 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1856 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1857 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1858 comparison.
1859
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001860 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1861 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1862 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1863 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001864 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001865
1866 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001867
1868 and ::
1869
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001870 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1871
1872 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1873 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1874 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1875 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1876
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001877 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1878 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1879 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1880 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1881 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1882
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001883 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1884 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001885 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1886 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001887
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001888Library
1889-------
1890
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001891- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1892 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1893
1894- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1895 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1896 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1897 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1898 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1899 See PEP 307 for details.
1900
1901- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1902 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1903
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001904- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1905 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001906 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001907 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1908 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001909 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001910
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001911- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1912 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1913
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001914- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1915 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1916 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1917
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001918- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1919
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001920- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1921 exception.
1922
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001923- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1924 class.
1925
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001926- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1927 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1928 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1929
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001930- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1931 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1932
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001933- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001934 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1935 See SF bug #659228.
1936
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001937- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1938 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1939 See SF patch #651082.
1940
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001941- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001942
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001943- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1944 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1945
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001946- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001947 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001948
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001949- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1950 DOS paths from other platforms.
1951
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001952Tools/Demos
1953-----------
1954
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001955- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1956 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1957 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1958 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1959 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1960 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1961 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1962 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1963 example:
1964
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001965 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1966 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001967
1968 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1969
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001970
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001971Build
1972-----
1973
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001974- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1975 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1976 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001977 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1978
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001979 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1980
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001981- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1982 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1983 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1984 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1985 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1986 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1987 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1988 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1989 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1990
1991- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1992 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1993 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1994 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1995
1996- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1997 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1998
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001999C API
2000-----
2001
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002002- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2003 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002004
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002005- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2006 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2007 tp_as_number pointer.
2008
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002009- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2010 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2011 (SF #681367)
2012
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002013- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2014 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2015 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2016 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002017
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002018Tests
2019-----
2020
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002021- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002022 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2023 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2024 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2025 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2026 pydoc.)
2027
2028- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2029
2030- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002031
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002032Windows
2033-------
2034
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002035- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2036 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2037 time).
2038
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002039- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2040 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2041
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002042- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2043 release without strong cryptography.
2044
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002045- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002046 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002047
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002048- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2049 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2050
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002051Mac
2052---
2053
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002054- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2055 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002056
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002057- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2058 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2059 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002060
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002061- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2062 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002063
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002064- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2065 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2066 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2067 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002068
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002069- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002070 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2071 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2072 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002073
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002074
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002075What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002076=================================
2077
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002078*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002079
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002080Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002081--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002082
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002083- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2084
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002085- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2086 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002087 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002088 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002089 a different meaning than before.
2090
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002091- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002092 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002093 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002094
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002095- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002096 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002097 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002098
2099- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2100 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2101 and deallocation.
2102
2103- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2104 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2105
2106- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2107 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2108 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2109 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2110 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2111
2112- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2113 now detected by the garbage collector.
2114
2115- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2116 [SF bug 519621]
2117
2118- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2119 identifier.
2120
2121- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2122 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2123 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2124 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2125 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2126 [SF bug 563060]
2127
2128- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2129 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2130 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2131 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2132 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2133
2134- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2135 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2136 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2137
2138- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2139
2140- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2141 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2142 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2143 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2144 state of the slots would be lost.)
2145
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002146Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002147-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002148
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002149- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002150 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2151 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2152 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2153 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002154 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2155 Jython 2.1.
2156
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002157- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002158 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002159 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2160 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2161 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2162 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2163 these, see PEP 302.
2164
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002165- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2166 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2167 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2168
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002169- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2170 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2171 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2172
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002173- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2174 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2175 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2176
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002177- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2178 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2179 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2180 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2181 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2182 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2183 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2184 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2185 releases or implementations.
2186
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002187- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002188 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2189 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002190
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002191- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2192 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2193
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002194- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2195 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2196 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2197
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002198- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2199 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2200
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002201- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2202 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002203 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2204 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002205
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002206- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2207 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2208 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2209 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2210 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2211
2212 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2213 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2214 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2215 pattern.
2216
2217 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2218 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2219 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2220 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2221
2222 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2223 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2224 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2225 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2226 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2227 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2228
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002229- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2230 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2231 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2232 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2233 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2234 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2235 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2236 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002237
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002238- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2239 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2240 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2241 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2242 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002243 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2244 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2245 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2246 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2247 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2248 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2249 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002250
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002251- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2252 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2253
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002254- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2255 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2256 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2257 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2258 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2259 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2260 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2261 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2262 to Zack Weinberg!
2263
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002264- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2265 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2266 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2267 type. This has been fixed now.
2268
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002269- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2270 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2271 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2272
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002273- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2274 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2275 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2276 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2277 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2278 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2279 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2280 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002281 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002282
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002283- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2284 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2285 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002286
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002287- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2288 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2289 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2290 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2291 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2292 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2293 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2294 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002295 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002296 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2297 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2298
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002299- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2300 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2301 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2302 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2303 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2304 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2305 this.)
2306
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002307- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2308 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002309 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002310 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002311 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2312 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002313 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2314 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002315
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002316- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2317 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2318 currently running.
2319
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002320- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2321 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2322 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2323 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2324
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002325- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2326 as directory names.
2327
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002328- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2329 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2330
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002331- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2332 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2333
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002334- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002335 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2336 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002337
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002338- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2339 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2340 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2341 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2342 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2343
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002344- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2345 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2346 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2347 removed.
2348
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002349- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2350 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2351 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2352
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002353- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2354 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2355 to __debug__.
2356
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002357- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2358 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2359 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2360
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002361- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2362 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2363 deprecated now.
2364
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002365- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2366 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2367 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002368
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002369- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2370 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2371 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2372 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2373 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002374
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002375- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2376 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2377
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002378- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2379 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2380 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002381 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002382 is backward compatible.
2383
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002384- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2385 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2386 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2387 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2388 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2389
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002390- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2391 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2392 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2393 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2394 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2395 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002396
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002397- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2398 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2399
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002400- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2401 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2402
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002403- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2404 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2405 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2406 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2407 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2408
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002409- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2410 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2411 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2412
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002413- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002414 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2415
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002416- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2417 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2418 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002419
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002420- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2421 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2422
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002423- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2424 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2425 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2426
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002427- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2428
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002429Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002430-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002431
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002432- Added three operators to the operator module:
2433 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2434 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2435 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2436
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002437- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2438
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002439- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2440 archives.
2441
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002442- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2443 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2444 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2445
2446 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2447
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002448- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2449 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2450 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002451 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002452
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002453- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2454 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2455 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2456 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002457 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2458 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2459 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2460 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002461
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002462- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2463 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002464
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002465- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2466
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002467- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2468 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2469
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002470- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2471 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2472 supported.
2473
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002474- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2475
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002476- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2477 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002478
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002479- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2480 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2481
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002482- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2483
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002484- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2485 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2486
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002487- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2488 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2489 functions but callable type objects.
2490
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002491- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002492 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002493 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002494
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002495- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2496 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002497
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002498- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2499 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002500
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002501- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2502 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2503 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2504 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2505
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002506- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2507 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002508
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002509- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2510 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2511 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2512 and __imul__.
2513
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002514- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002515 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2516 is called.
2517
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002518- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2519 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2520 interpreter was compiled.
2521
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002522- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2523 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2524 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002525 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002526 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2527 1, not 2.
2528
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002529- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2530 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2531 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2532 limit.
2533
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002534- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2535 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2536 bug #623464.
2537
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002538- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2539 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2540 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2541 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2542
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002543Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002544-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002545
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002546- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2547
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002548- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2549 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2550 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2551 with Python 2.3a2.
2552
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002553- os.path exposes getctime.
2554
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002555- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002556 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002557 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002558 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002559 unit tests of floating point results.
2560
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002561- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2562 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2563 has been increased.
2564
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002565- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2566 executed.
2567
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002568- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2569 postinstallation script.
2570
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002571- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2572 test the current module.
2573
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002574- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002575 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2576 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2577 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2578 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2579
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002580- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002581 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002582 Ward's Optik package.
2583
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002584- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2585 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2586 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2587 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2588
2589- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2590 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002591 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002592
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002593- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2594 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2595 shelf are binary pickles.
2596
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002597- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2598 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2599
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002600- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2601 modules are iterators now.
2602
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002603- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2604 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2605 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2606 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2607 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2608 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002609
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002610- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2611 with their entity value.
2612
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002613- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2614
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002615- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2616 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002617
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002618- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2619 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002620 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002621
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002622- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2623 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2624 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2625 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2626 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2627 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2628 main():
2629
2630 import locale
2631 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2632
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002633- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2634 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2635
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002636- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2637 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2638 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2639 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2640 to the new standard.
2641
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002642- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2643 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2644 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2645 an extension to the database.
2646
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002647- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2648 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2649 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2650 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002651 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002652
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002653- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002654 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002655
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002656- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2657 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2658 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2659 bounded integers.
2660
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002661- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2662 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2663 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2664 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2665 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2666 in existence.
2667
2668 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2669 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2670 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2671 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2672 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2673 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2674
2675 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2676 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2677 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2678 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2679
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002680- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2681 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2682 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2683
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002684- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2685
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002686- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2687 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2688 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2689 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2690
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002691- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2692 argument.
2693
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002694- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2695 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2696 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2697 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2698 [SF patch 560794].
2699
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002700- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2701 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2702 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002703 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2704 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2705 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002706
2707- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2708 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002709
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002710- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2711 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2712 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2713 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002714
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002715- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2716 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2717 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2718 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2719 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2720
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002721- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002722
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002723- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2724
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002725- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2726 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2727 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2728 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2729 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2730 identical to None.
2731
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002732- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2733 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2734 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2735 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2736 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2737 results now.
2738
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002739- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2740 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2741
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002742- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2743 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2744 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2745 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2746 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2747 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2748 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2749 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2750
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002751- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2752
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002753- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2754 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2755
2756- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2757 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2758 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2759 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2760 and other systems.
2761
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002762- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2763 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2764 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2765 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 +00002766 work well with these.
2767
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002768- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2769
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002770- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002771 connections.
2772
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002773- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2774 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2775 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2776
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002777- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2778 sets
2779
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002780- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2781 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2782 name.
2783
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002784- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2785 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2786 passed in.
2787
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002788- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002789 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002790 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2791 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002792
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002793- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2794
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002795- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2796
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002797- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2798 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2799 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2800
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002801- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2802 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2803 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2804 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002805 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002806
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002807- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002808 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002809 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002810
2811- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2812 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2813 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2814
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002815- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002816 the value of its expression argument.
2817
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002818- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2819 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2820 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2821
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002822- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2823 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2824 skipstone browser was included.
2825
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002826- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2827 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2828
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002829Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002830-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002831
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002832- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2833 names in addition to accepting file names.
2834
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002835- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2836 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2837 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2838 still used and useful.)
2839
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002840- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2841 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2842 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2843 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002844
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002845- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2846 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2847 the generated binary.
2848
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002849Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002850-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002851
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002852- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2853
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002854- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2855 except in the hands of experts.
2856
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002857- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002858 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2859 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2860 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002861
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002862- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2863 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2864 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2865 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2866 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2867 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2868 builds.
2869
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002870- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2871 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2872 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2873 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2874 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2875 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2876 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2877 new type.
2878
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002879- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002880
2881 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2882 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2883 positive infinities.
2884
2885 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2886 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2887 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2888 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2889 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2890 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2891 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2892
2893 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2894
2895 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2896
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002897- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2898 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2899 size of the executable.
2900
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002901- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2902 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2903 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2904 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002905
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002906- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2907
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002908- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2909 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2910 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002911
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002912- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2913 well as Unix.
2914
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002915- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2916 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2917 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2918 modules in the README file for details.
2919
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002920C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002921-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002922
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002923- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2924 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002925 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002926 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002927 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002928
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002929- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2930 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2931 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2932 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2933 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2934 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002935 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002936 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2937 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2938 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2939 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2940 aligned.)
2941
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002942- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2943 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2944 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2945
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002946- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2947 level.
2948
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002949- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2950 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2951 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2952 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2953 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2954
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002955- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2956 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2957 code.
2958
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002959- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2960 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2961 adjusting for negative indices.
2962
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002963- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2964 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2965 object.
2966
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002967- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2968 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2969 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2970
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002971- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2972 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002973
2974- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2975
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002976- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2977 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2978 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2979 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2980
2981- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2982
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002983- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002984
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002985- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002986 without going through the buffer API.
2987
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002988- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002989
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002990- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2991 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2992 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2993 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2994
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002995- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2996 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2997
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002998- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002999 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3000
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003001New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003002-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003003
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003004- OpenVMS is now supported.
3005
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003006- AtheOS is now supported.
3007
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003008- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3009
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003010- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3011
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003012Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003013-----
3014
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003015- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3016 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3017 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003018
3019Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003020-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003021
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003022- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3023 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3024 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3025 bugs.
3026 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003027 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003028 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3029 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003030 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003031
3032- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003033 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003034
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003035- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3036 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3037
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003038- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3039 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003040 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003041 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3042
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003043- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3044 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3045 use files" uninstall option).
3046
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003047- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3048
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003049- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3050 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3051
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003052- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3053 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3054 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3055
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003056- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3057 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3058 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3059 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3060 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003061 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3062 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3063 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003064
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003065- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003066 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003067 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3068 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3069 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3070 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3071 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3072 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3073 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3074 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3075 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3076 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3077 work around.
3078
3079- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3080 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3081 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3082 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3083 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3084 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3085 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3086 specified with O_CREAT too).
3087
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003088Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003089----
3090
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003091- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003092
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003093- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3094 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3095 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3096
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003097- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3098 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3099 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3100
3101- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3102 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3103 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3104 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3105 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3106 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3107 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3108 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003109
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003110- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3111 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3112 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003113
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003114- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3115 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3116 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3117 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3118 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003119
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003120- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3121 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3122 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003123
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003124- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3125 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003126
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003127- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3128 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3129 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3130 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3131 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003132
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003133- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3134 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3135 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3136
3137- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3138 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3139 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003140
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003141- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3142 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3143 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3144 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003145 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003146
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003147- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3148 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003149
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003150- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3151 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003152
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003153- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003154 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003155 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3156 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003157
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003158
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003159What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003160===============================
3161
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003162*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3163
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003164Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003165--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003166
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003167- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3168 with a custom metaclass.
3169
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003170Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003171-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003172
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003173- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3174 are proxies.
3175
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003176Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003177-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003178
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003179- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3180 very short strings.
3181
3182- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3183 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3184 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3185 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3186 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3187
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003188Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003189-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003190
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003191- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3192 close or delete time).
3193
3194- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3195 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3196
3197- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3198
3199- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003200 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003201
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003202Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003203-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003204
3205Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003206-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003207
3208C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003209-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003210
3211New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003212-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003213
3214Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003215-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003216
3217Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003218-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003219
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003220- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3221
3222- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3223 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3224
3225- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3226 deleted at process exit time.
3227
3228- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3229 in backslash.
3230
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003231Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003232----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003233
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003234- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3235 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3236 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3237
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003238
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003239What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003240===========================
3241
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003242*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3243
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003244Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003245--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003246
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003247- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3248 been extensively updated. See
3249
3250 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3251
3252 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3253
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003254- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3255 deleted!
3256
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003257- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3258 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3259 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3260 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3261 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3262
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003263- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3264
3265 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3266 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3267
3268 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3269 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3270 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3271 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3272 supported anyway.
3273
3274 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3275 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3276
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003277- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3278 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3279 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3280 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3281 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003282
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003283- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3284 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3285 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3286
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003287Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003288-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003289
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003290- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3291 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3292 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3293 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3294 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3295 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003296 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3297 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3298 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3299 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003300
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003301- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3302 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3303 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3304
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003305Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003306-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003307
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003308- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3309
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003310Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003311-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003312
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003313- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3314 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3315 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3316 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3317 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3318 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3319
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003320- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3321
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003322- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3323
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003324- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3325
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003326- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3327 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3328 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3329
3330- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3331
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003332Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003333-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003334
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003335- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3336 off a search on Google.
3337
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003338Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003339-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003340
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003341- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3342 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3343 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3344 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3345 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3346 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3347 other platforms should do likewise.
3348
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003349- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3350 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3351 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3352
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003353C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003354-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003355
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003356- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3357 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3358 producing key-value pairs.
3359
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003360- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003361 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003362 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3363 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3364 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3365 previously went unchallenged.
3366
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003367New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003368-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003369
3370Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003371-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003372
3373Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003374-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003375
3376Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003377----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003378
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003379- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3380 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003381
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003382- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3383 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3384 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3385 home.
3386
3387
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003388What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003389===========================
3390
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003391*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3392
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003393Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003394--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003395
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003396- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3397 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003398
3399 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003400 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003401
3402 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3403 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003404 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003405 This needs to be documented.
3406
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003407- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3408 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3409
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003410- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3411 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3412 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3413
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003414- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3415 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3416
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003417- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3418 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3419 class forbids it).
3420
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003421- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3422 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3423 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3424
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003425- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3426
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003427Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003428-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003429
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003430- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3431 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003432 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003433
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003434- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3435 (like 1 + '').
3436
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003437Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003438-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003439
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003440- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3441 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3442 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3443 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003444 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003445 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3446
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003447- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3448 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3449 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3450 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3451
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003452- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3453 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003454 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3455 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3456 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003457
3458- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3459 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003460
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003461- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3462 bytes on its input.
3463
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003464Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003465-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003466
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003467- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003468 convenience function.
3469
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003470- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3471 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3472 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003473 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3474 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3475 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3476 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3477 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3478 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003479
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003480- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3481 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3482 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3483 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3484
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003485- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3486 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3487 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3488
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003489- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3490 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3491 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3492 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3493
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003494- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3495 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003496 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003497 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3498 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3499 new -l and -e options.
3500
3501- statcache is now deprecated.
3502
3503- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3504 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003505 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003506 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3507 time properly taken into account.
3508
3509- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3510 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3511 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3512 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3513
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003514Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003515-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003516
3517Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003518-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003519
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003520- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3521 is built with libdb3 if available.
3522
3523- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3524
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003525C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003526-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003527
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003528- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3529 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3530 PySequence_Size().
3531
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003532- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3533
3534- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3535 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3536 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3537
3538- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3539 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3540
3541- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3542 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3543
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003544New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003545-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003546
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003547- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3548 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3549
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003550- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3551 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3552
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003553- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3554
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003555Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003556-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003557
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003558- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3559 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3560
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003561Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003562-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003563
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003564Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003565----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003566
3567- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3568 removed completely in the next release.
3569
3570- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3571 OSX.
3572
3573- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3574 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3575
3576- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3577
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003578
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003579What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003580===========================
3581
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003582*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3583
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003584Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003585--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003586
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003587- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003588 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003589 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003590 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3591 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003592 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3593 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003594 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3595 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003596
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003597- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3598 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3599
3600- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3601 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3602
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003603Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003604-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003605
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003606- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3607 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3608 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3609 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3610 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3611 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3612 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3613 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3614
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003615- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3616 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3617 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3618 example).
3619
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003620- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003621 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003622 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003623 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003624
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003625- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3626 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3627 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003628 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003629
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003630- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3631 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3632 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3633 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3634 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3635 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3636
3637 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3638
3639 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3640
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003641Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003642-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003643
3644- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3645
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003646- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3647
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003648- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3649 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003650
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003651- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3652 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3653 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3654 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3655 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3656 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003657 attributes.
3658
3659- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3660 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3661 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003662
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003663- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3664 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3665 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003666
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003667- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3668 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3669 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003670 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3671 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3672
3673- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3674 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003675
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003676Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003677-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003678
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003679- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3680 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3681
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003682- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3683 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3684 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3685 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3686
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003687- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3688 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3689 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3690 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3691
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003692 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3693 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3694 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3695 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3696 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3697 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3698 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3699 without losing information).
3700
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003701- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003702 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3703 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3704 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3705 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3706 module).
3707
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003708 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003709 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3710 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3711 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3712 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003713
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003714- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003715 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3716 encoding.
3717
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003718- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3719 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3720
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003721- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003722 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3723
3724- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3725 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3726 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3727 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3728
3729- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3730
3731- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3732 ON, and OFF.
3733
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003734- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3735 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3736
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003737Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003738-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003739
3740- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3741 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3742 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003743
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003744- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3745 been added: -X and -E.
3746
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003747Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003748-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003749
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003750- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3751 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3752
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003753C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003754-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003755
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003756- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3757 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3758 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3759 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3760 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3761
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003762- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3763 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3764 as long) arguments.
3765
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003766- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3767 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3768 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3769 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3770 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3771 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3772
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003773- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3774 input.
3775
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003776New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003777-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003778
3779Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003780-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003781
3782Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003783-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003784
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003785- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3786 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3787 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3788
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003789- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3790 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3791 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003792 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003793
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003794 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3795 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3796 import signal
3797 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003798
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003799 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003800 while 1:
3801 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003802 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003803 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3804 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3805 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3806 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003807
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003808
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003809What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3810===========================
3811
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003812*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3813
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003814Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003815--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003816
3817- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3818 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3819 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3820
3821- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3822 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3823 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3824 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3825 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3826 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3827 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003828
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003829- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003830 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003831 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3832 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3833 associate a docstring with a property.
3834
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003835- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3836 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3837 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3838 other built-in object types.
3839
3840- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3841 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3842 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3843 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3844 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3845
3846- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3847 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3848
3849- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3850 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003851 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003852 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3853 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3854 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3855 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3856 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3857
3858- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3859 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3860 class.
3861
3862- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3863 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3864 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3865 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3866
3867- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3868 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3869 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3870 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3871
3872- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3873 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3874
3875- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3876 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3877 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3878 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3879 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003880 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003881 with the same value as s.
3882
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003883- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3884
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003885Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003886----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003887
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003888- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3889
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003890- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3891 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3892 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3893 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3894 objects.
3895
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003896- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3897 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003898 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3899 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3900
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003901- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3902 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3903 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3904
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003905Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003906-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003907
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003908- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3909 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3910 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3911 by the instances.
3912
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003913- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3914 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3915 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3916
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003917- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3918 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3919 before the entire comparison is complete.
3920
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003921- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3922 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3923 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3924
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003925- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3926 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3927 getwriter().
3928
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003929- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3930 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3931
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003932- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003933 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3934 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3935
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003936- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3937 iterable object.
3938
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003939- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3940 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003941
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003942- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3943 authentication.
3944
3945- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3946 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003947
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003948- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003949 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3950 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3951 a sample driver.)
3952
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003953Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003954-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003955
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003956- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3957 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3958 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3959 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3960 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3961 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3962 kernel has large file support.
3963
3964- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3965 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3966 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3967 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3968 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3969
3970- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3971 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3972 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3973
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003974C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003975-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003976
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003977- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3978 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3979
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003980New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003981-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003982
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003983- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3984 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3985
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003986Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003987-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003988
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003989- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3990 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3991 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3992 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3993 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3994
3995- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3996 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3997 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3998 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3999
4000- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4001 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4002
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004003Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004004-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004005
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004006- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004007 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4008 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004009
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004010
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004011What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4012===========================
4013
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004014*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4015
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004016Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004017----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004018
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004019- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4020 big to represent as a C double.
4021
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004022- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4023 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4024 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4025 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4026 restriction).
4027
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004028- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4029 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4030 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4031 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4032 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4033
4034 >>> dir([])
4035 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4036 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4037 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4038 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4039 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4040 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4041 'reverse', 'sort']
4042
4043 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4044
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004045- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004046 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4047 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4048 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4049 OverflowError exception.
4050
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004051- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004052 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004053 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4054 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4055 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4056 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4057 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004058 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004059 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4060 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4061
4062 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4063 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4064 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4065 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004066
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004067- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004068 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4069 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4070 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4071 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4072 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4073 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4074 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4075 once it is created.
4076
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004077- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4078 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4079 (key, value) pairs.
4080
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004081- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004082 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4083 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4084
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004085- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4086 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4087 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4088 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4089 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004090
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004091- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004092 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4093 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4094
4095 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4096
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004097- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004098 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4099
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004100Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004101-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004102
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004103- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004104 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4105 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004106
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004107- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4108 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4109 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4110 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4111 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4112 in this area anymore).
4113
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004114- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4115 threading.Timer.
4116
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004117- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4118 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4119
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004120- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004121 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4122
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004123- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004124 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4125 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4126 converted to Python longs.
4127
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004128- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004129 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4130
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004131- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4132 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4133 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4134
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004135Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004136-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004137
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004138- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4139 division operators as per PEP 238.
4140
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004141Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004142-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004143
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004144- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4145 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4146 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4147 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4148
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004149C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004150-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004151
4152- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004153
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004154- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4155 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004156 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004157
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004158 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4159 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004160 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004161 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004162
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004163- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004164 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4165 module:
4166
4167 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004168
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004169 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4170 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004171
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004172 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4173 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004174
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004175 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4176
4177 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4178
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004179- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004180 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4181 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4182 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004183
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004184New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004185-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004186
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004187- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4188 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4189 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4190 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4191 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004192
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004193Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004194-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004195
4196Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004197-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004198
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004199- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4200 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4201 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4202 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004203 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4204 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4205 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4206 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4207 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004208
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004209- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004210 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4211
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004212
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004213What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4214===========================
4215
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004216*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4217
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004218Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004219-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004220
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004221- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4222 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4223
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004224- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4225 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4226 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004227
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004228- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4229 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4230 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4231 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004232
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004233- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4234
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004235- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004236
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004237Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004238-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004239
4240- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004241 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004242 the module docstring for details.
4243
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004244Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004245-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004246
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004247- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004248 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4249 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4250 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004251
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004252- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4253 Nick Mathewson.
4254
4255Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004256----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004257
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004258- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4259 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4260 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4261 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4262 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4263 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4264 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4265 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4266
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004267- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4268 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4269 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4270 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4271
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004272- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4273 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4274 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4275 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4276 come a long way).
4277
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004278- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4279 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4280 write filters for these warnings).
4281
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004282- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4283 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4284 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4285 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4286 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4287
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004288- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4289 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4290 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4291 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4292 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4293 older distribution.
4294
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004295Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004296-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004297
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004298- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4299 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004300 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004301
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004302- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4303 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4304 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4305
4306- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4307
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004308- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4309
4310- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4311
4312- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4313
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004314- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004315
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004316- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4317
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004318New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004319-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004320
4321C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004322-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004323
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004324- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4325 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4326 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4327 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4328 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4329 against buffer overruns.
4330
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004331- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004332 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4333 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004334 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4335 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4336 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4337
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004338- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4339 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4340 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4341 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4342 deprecated.
4343
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004344Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004345-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004346
4347- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4348 relevant is found.
4349
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004350
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004351What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004352===========================
4353
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004354*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4355
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004356Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004357----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004358
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004359- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4360 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4361 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4362 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4363 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4364 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4365 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4366 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004367 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004368 repaired.
4369
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004370- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004371 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004372 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4373 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4374 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4375 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4376 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4377 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4378 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4379 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4380
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004381- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4382 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4383 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4384 leading BMO character).
4385
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004386- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4387 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4388 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4389
4390 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4391 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4392 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004393
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004394 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4395 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4396 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4397 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4398 for various simple to use conversions.
4399
4400 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4401 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4402
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004403 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4404 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4405 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4406 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4407 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4408 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4409 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4410 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4411 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4412 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4413 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4414 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4415 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4416 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4417 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004418
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004419- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4420 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4421 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004422 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004423 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004424
4425 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004426 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4427 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4428 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4429 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4430 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004431 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4432 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004433
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004434 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4435 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4436 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004437 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004438
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004439- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4440 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4441 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4442 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4443 floating arithmetic,
4444
4445 x = 9007199254740992.0
4446 print long(x)
4447
4448 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4449 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4450 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4451 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4452 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4453 functions are of good quality).
4454
4455 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4456 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4457 algorithms to break.
4458
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004459- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4460 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4461 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4462 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4463 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4464 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4465 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4466 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4467 order.
4468
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004469- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4470 operation along the most common code paths.
4471
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004472- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4473 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4474
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004475- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4476 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4477 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4478 {}.update(UserDict())
4479
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004480- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4481 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4482 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4483 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4484 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4485 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4486 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4487 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4488
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004489- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004490 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004491
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004492 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004493 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4494 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004495 join() method of strings
4496 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004497 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4498 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004499 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004500 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004501
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004502- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4503 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4504
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004505- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4506 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4507
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004508- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4509 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4510 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4511 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4512
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004513- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4514 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004515 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004516 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4517 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004518
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004519- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4520
4521
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004522Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004523-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004524
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004525- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004526 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004527 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4528 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4529
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004530- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4531 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4532
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004533- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4534 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4535 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4536 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4537
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004538- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4539 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4540 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4541
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004542- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4543
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004544- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4545
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004546- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4547 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4548 that are still imported into string.py).
4549
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004550- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4551
4552- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4553 Now it does.
4554
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004555- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4556
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004557- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4558 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4559 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4560 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4561 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004562 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4563 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004564
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004565- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4566 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4567 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4568 'help(object)'.
4569
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004570Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004571-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004572
4573- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004574 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004575 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4576 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4577
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004578- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004579 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4580 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004581
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004582C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004583-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004584
4585- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4586 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004587
4588----
4589
4590**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**