blob: bfeda8332639f64bbf26bff33b825ee3c73c0ab2 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10Core and builtins
11-----------------
12
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000013- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
14
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000015- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
16 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error)
17
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000018- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
19
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000020- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
21 returning None.
22
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000023- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
24 ('\') with a specific error message.
25
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000026- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
27
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000028- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
29 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
30
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000031- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000032 an ferror() call.
33
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000034- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
35 list.sort().
36
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000037- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
38 (2+3) --> (5).
39
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000040- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
41
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +000042- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
43 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000044
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +000045- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
46 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
47 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
48
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000049Extension Modules
50-----------------
51
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +000052- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
53 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
54 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
55
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +000056- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
57
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +000058- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
59 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
60
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +000061- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
62 file size.
63
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +000064- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
65
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +000066- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
67 {remove_history,replace_history}
68
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +000069- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
70 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +000071
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +000072- stat_float_times is now True.
73
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000074- array.array objects are now picklable.
75
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000076- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
77 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
78
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000079- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
80 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
81 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
82
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +000083- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
84 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000085
86Library
87-------
88
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +000089- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
90 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
91
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +000092- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
93 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
94
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +000095- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
96
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +000097- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
98 to build.
99
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000100- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
101 symbolic links on Windows.
102
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000103- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
104 profile.py if available.
105
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000106- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
107
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000108- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
109 in LWPCookieJar.
110
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000111- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
112
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000113- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
114
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000115- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
116
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000117- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
118
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000119- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
120
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000121- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
122
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000123- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
124
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000125- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
126
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000127- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
128 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
129 be exploited in various ways.
130
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000131- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
132
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000133- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
134
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000135- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
136
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000137- Enhancements to the csv module:
138
139 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
140 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
141 PEP 305.
142 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
143 reporting.
144 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
145 dictates.
146 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000147 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000148 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000149 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
150 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000151 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
152 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000153 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000154 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
155 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
156 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
157 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
158 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
159 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
160 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
161 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
162 without first creating a dialect class.
163 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
164 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
165 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000166 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000167 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
168 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000169 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
170 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
171 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
172 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000173 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
174 This has been fixed.
175
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000176- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
177 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
178 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
179 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
180
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000181- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
182
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000183- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
184 (Bug #951915).
185
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000186- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
187 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
188 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
189 encoding alias table
190
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000191- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
192
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000193- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
194 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
195
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000196- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
197
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000198- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
199
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000200- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
201
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000202- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
203
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000204- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
205
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000206- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
207 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
208 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
209
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000210- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000211 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000212
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000213- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
214 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
215 tokenizer with very long source lines.
216
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000217- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
218 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
219
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000220- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
221 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000222
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000223- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
224 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
225
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000226- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
227 correctly.
228
229
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000230Build
231-----
232
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000233- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
234
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000235- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
236 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
237
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000238- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
239 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
240 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
241 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
242 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
243 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
244 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
245 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
246
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000247- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
248 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
249 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
250 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
251
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000252
253C API
254-----
255
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000256- Removed PyRange_New().
257
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000258
259Tests
260-----
261
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000262- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000263
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000264
265Documentation
266-------------
267
268- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
269 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
270 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
271
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000272Mac
273---
274
275
276
277Tools/Demos
278-----------
279
280
281
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000282What's New in Python 2.4 final?
283===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000284
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000285*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000286
287Core and builtins
288-----------------
289
290- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
291 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
292 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
293
294
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000295What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
296==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000297
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000298*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000299
300Core and builtins
301-----------------
302
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000303- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
304 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
305 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
306
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000307
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000308Library
309-------
310
311- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
312 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
313 raised is re-raised.
314
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000315- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
316 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
317
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000318- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
319 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
320 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
321 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
322 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
323 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
324 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
325 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
326 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
327 by the slice are recomputed now.
328
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000329- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000330
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000331Build
332-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000333
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000334- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
335 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
336 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000337
338C API
339-----
340
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000341- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
342
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000343
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000344What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
345================================
346
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000347*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000348
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000349License
350-------
351
352The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
353is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
354changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
355Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
356intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
357durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
358the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
359License::
360
361 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
362
363says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
364to Python 2.1.1.
365
366The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
367License Version 2.
368
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000369Core and builtins
370-----------------
371
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000372- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
373 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
374 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
375 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
376 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
377 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
378 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
379 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
380 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
381 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
382
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000383- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000384
385Extension Modules
386-----------------
387
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000388- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
389 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
390 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
391 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000392
393Library
394-------
395
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000396- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
397 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
398 returned.
399
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000400- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
401
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000402- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
403 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
404
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000405- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
406
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000407- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
408 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000409
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000410- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
411
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000412- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
413
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000414- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000415 the source code is updated and reloaded.
416
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000417Build
418-----
419
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000420- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000421
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000422What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
423================================
424
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000425*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000426
427Core and builtins
428-----------------
429
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000430- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000431 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
432
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000433- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
434 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
435 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
436 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
437
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000438- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
439 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
440
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000441- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
442 constant.
443
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000444- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
445 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
446 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
447 large), and to anomalies such as
448 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
449 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
450 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
451 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000452
453Extension modules
454-----------------
455
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000456- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
457 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000458 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
459 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
460 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000461
462Library
463-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000464
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000465- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000466 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000467 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
468 --swig-cpp.
469
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000470- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
471 it is set.
472
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000473- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000474
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000475- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
476 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
477 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
478 Closes bug #1039270.
479
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000480- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000481
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000482 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000483 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
484 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
485 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
486 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
487 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
488 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
489 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
490 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
491 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
492 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
493 + Updates to documentation.
494
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000495- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
496 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
497 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
498 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
499
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000500- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000501
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000502- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
503 applications should use the getmember function.
504
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000505- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
506
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000507- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
508 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
509 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
510 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
511 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
512 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
513 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
514 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
515 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
516
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000517- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
518 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000519 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000520
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000521- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
522 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
523 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
524 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
525 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
526 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
527 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
528 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000529
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000530- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
531 the new public features (of which there are many).
532
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000533- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000534 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
535 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
536 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
537 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000538 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000539
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000540- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
541
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000542- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
543 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
544 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
545 options.
546
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000547- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
548 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
549 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
550 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
551 conditions under which non-string values work.
552
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000553Build
554-----
555
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000556- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
557 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
558 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
559
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000560- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
561 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
562 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
563 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
564 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000565
566C API
567-----
568
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000569- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
570 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
571
572- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
573
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000574- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
575 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
576 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
577 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
578 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
579 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
580 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
581 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
582 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
583
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000584- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
585
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000586- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
587 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
588 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000589
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000590Tests
591-----
592
593- test__locale ported to unittest
594
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000595Mac
596---
597
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000598- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
599 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
600 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000601
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000602Tools/Demos
603-----------
604
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000605- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
606 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
607 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
608 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
609 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000610
611
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000612What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
613=================================
614
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000615*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000616
617Core and builtins
618-----------------
619
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000620- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000621 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
622
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000623- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
624 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
625 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
626 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
627 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
628 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
629 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
630 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000631 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
632 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
633 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
634 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
635 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000636
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000637- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
638 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
639 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
640 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
641 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
642
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000643- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
644
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000645- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
646 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
647
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000648- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
649 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
650 modified the list.
651
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000652- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
653 functions is now writable.
654
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000655- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
656 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
657 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
658 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
659
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000660- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
661 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
662 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
663 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
664 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000665
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000666- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
667 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
668
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000669Extension modules
670-----------------
671
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000672- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
673
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000674- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
675 data.
676
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000677- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
678 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
679 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
680 supposed to have been truncated away.
681
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000682- Added socket.socketpair().
683
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000684- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
685 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
686
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000687- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000688 versions of Python, have now been removed.
689
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000690Library
691-------
692
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000693- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000694 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000695
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000696- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
697 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
698
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000699- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
700 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
701
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000702- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
703
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000704- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
705 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000706
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000707- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
708 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
709
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000710- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
711
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000712- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
713
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000714- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
715
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000716- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
717 Percivall.
718
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000719- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
720 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
721
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000722- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
723 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
724 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000725 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000726
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000727- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
728 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
729 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
730 and exponent.
731
732- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
733
734- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
735 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
736 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
737
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000738- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
739 to the readline module.
740
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000741- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000742 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
743 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000744
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000745- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
746 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
747 contains symlinks.
748
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000749- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
750 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
751
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000752- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
753 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
754 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
755
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000756- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
757 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
758 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
759 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
760 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
761 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
762 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
763 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
764 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
765 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
766 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
767 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
768 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
769
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000770- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
771
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000772Tools/Demos
773-----------
774
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000775- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
776 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
777
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000778- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
779
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000780Build
781-----
782
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000783- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
784 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
785 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
786 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
787 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
788 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
789 plans to do so.
790
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000791- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
792 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
793
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000794- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
795 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
796
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000797- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
798 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
799
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000800- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
801 GNU/k*BSD systems.
802
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000803- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
804 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
805
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000806C API
807-----
808
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000809..
810
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000811Documentation
812-------------
813
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000814- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
815 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
816
817- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
818 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
819 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000820
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000821New platforms
822-------------
823
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000824- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
825
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000826Tests
827-----
828
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000829..
830
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000831Windows
832-------
833
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000834- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
835 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
836 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
837 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
838 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
839 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
840 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
841 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
842 the problem.
843
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000844Mac
845---
846
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000847..
848
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000849
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000850What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
851=================================
852
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000853*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000854
855Core and builtins
856-----------------
857
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000858- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
859 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
860 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
861 sensitive code.
862
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000863- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000864 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000865
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000866 @staticmethod
867 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000868
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000869 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000870
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000871- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
872 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
873 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
874 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
875 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
876 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
877 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
878 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
879 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
880 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
881 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
882
883 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
884 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
885 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
886 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
887 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
888 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
889 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
890
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000891- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
892 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
893
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000894- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000895 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000896
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000897- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000898 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000899 which was missing for no apparent reason.
900
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000901- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000902 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
903 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
904
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000905- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
906 types that support garbage collection.
907
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000908- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
909
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000910- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
911 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
912 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
913 Jython.
914
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000915- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
916
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000917- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
918 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
919
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000920- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
921 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
922 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000923
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000924- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
925 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
926 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
927
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000928Extension modules
929-----------------
930
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000931- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
932
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000933Library
934-------
935
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000936- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
937 TIS-620
938
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000939- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
940 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
941 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
942 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
943 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
944 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
945 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
946 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
947 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
948 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
949
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000950- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
951
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000952- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
953 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
954 same as when the argument is omitted).
955 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
956
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000957- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
958
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000959- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
960 schemes are offered.
961
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000962- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
963
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000964- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
965 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
966 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
967
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000968- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
969
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000970- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
971 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
972
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000973- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
974 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
975 when dummy_threading is being used.
976
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000977- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
978 from a tarfile.
979
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000980- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000981 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000982
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000983- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
984 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
985 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
986 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
987
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000988- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
989 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
990
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000991- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
992 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
993 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
994 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
995 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
996 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
997 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
998 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
999 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1000 by some other method in progress).
1001
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001002- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1003 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1004 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001005
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001006- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1007
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001008- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1009 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1010 AM Kuchling.
1011
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001012- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1013 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1014 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1015
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001016- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1017 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1018 instead of unsigned.
1019
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001020- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001021 no longer part of the public API.
1022
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001023- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1024 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1025 string methods of the same name).
1026
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001027- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001028 SF patch 945642.
1029
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001030- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1031
1032 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1033
1034 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1035 DocTestSuites.
1036
1037- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1038 that provide thread-local data.
1039
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001040- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1041 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1042
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001043- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1044
1045- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1046 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1047 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1048
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001049- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1050
1051 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1052 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1053 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001054
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001055 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1056 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1057 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1058 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1059
1060 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1061 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1062
1063 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1064 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1065 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1066 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1067
1068 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1069 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1070 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1071 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1072 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1073
1074 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1075 wrapping help output.
1076
1077 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1078 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1079 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001080
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001081C API
1082-----
1083
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001084- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1085 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1086 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1087 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1088 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1089 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1090 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1091 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1092 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1093 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1094 its visible semantics have not changed.
1095
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001096- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1097 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1098
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001099Documentation
1100-------------
1101
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001102- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001103
1104 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001105 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001106
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001107 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001108
1109 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1110
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001111- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001112
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001113Tests
1114-----
1115
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001116- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001117 platforms that use the Makefile.
1118
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001119- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1120 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1121 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1122
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001123
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001124What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1125=================================
1126
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001127*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001128
1129Core and builtins
1130-----------------
1131
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001132- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1133 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1134 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1135 objects now (one object instead of three).
1136
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001137- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1138 Windows DLLs.
1139
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001140- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1141 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001142
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001143- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1144 a new .pyc magic.
1145
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001146- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1147 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1148 be there.
1149
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001150- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1151 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1152 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1153
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001154- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1155 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1156 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1157
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001158- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1159
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001160- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1161 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1162 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001163
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001164- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1165 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1166
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001167- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1168
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001169- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001170 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001171
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001172- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1173
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001174- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1175
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001176- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1177 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1178
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001179- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1180 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1181 Fixes bug #858016 .
1182
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001183- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1184 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1185 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1186
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001187- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1188 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1189 improves their performance (about 35%).
1190
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001191- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1192 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1193 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1194
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001195- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1196 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1197 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1198 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1199
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001200- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1201 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001202 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001203 length is not known).
1204
1205- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1206 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001207 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1208 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001209 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1210
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001211- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1212 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1213
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001214- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1215 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1216 keyword arguments.
1217
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001218- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1219 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1220 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1221
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001222- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1223 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1224 cases.
1225
1226- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1227 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1228 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1229 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1230 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1231 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1232 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1233 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1234 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1235 a release build.
1236
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001237- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1238 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1239
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001240- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001241 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001242
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001243- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1244 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1245 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1246 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1247 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1248 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1249 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1250 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1251 destroyed.
1252
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001253- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1254 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1255 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1256 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1257 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1258 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1259 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1260 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1261
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001262- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1263 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1264 character other than a space.
1265
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001266- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1267 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1268 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1269 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1270 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1271 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1272 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1273 attributes with the same name.
1274
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001275- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1276 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1277 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1278 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1279 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1280 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1281 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1282 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1283 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1284 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1285 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1286 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1287 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1288 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001289
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001290- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1291 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1292 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1293 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1294 This has been repaired.
1295
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001296- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1297
1298- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1299
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001300- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1301 over a sequence.
1302
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001303- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001304 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001305
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001306- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1307
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001308- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1309 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1310 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1311 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1312 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1313 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1314 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1315 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1316
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001317- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1318 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1319 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1320
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001321- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1322 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1323 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1324 freelist.
1325
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001326- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1327 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1328
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001329- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1330 number.
1331
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001332- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1333 a TypeError exception.
1334
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001335- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1336 820195.
1337
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001338- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1339 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1340 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1341
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001342- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001343 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1344 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001345
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001346- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1347 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1348 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1349
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001350- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1351 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001352 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001353
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001354- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001355 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1356 the first call.
1357
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001358
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001359Extension modules
1360-----------------
1361
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001362- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1363 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1364
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001365- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1366 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1367 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1368 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1369 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1370 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1371 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001372
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001373- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1374
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001375- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1376
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001377- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1378 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1379
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001380- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1381 fewer false positives.
1382
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001383- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1384 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1385
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001386- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001387 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1388
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001389- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001390 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001391 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001392 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1393 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001394
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001395- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1396 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1397 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1398 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1399
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001400- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1401 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1402 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1403 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1404 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1405 #897625.
1406
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001407- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1408 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1409
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001410- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1411 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1412 and pops on either side of the deque.
1413
1414- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1415 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1416
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001417- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1418 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1419 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1420 other functions that expect a function argument.
1421
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001422- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1423
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001424- os.getsid was added.
1425
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001426- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1427 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1428 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1429
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001430- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1431
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001432- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1433
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001434- readline.clear_history was added.
1435
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001436- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1437
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001438- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1439
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001440- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1441
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001442- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1443
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001444- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1445
1446- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1447
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001448- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1449
1450- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1451
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001452- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1453 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1454 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1455
1456- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1457 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1458 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1459 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1460 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1461 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1462 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1463
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001464- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1465 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1466 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1467 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001468
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001469- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001470 iterators from a single iterable.
1471
1472- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1473 of raising a TypeError exception.
1474
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001475- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1476 as parameter.
1477
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001478Library
1479-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001480
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001481- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1482 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1483 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001484
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001485- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1486 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1487 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001488
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001489- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001490
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001491- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1492 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001493
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001494- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1495 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1496
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001497- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1498
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001499- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001500 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001501
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001502- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001503 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001504
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001505- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1506
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001507- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1508 on cygwin and mingw32.
1509
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001510- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1511
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001512- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1513 module.
1514
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001515- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1516 installation scheme for all platforms.
1517
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001518- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001519 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001520
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001521- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1522 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1523 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1524
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001525- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1526 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1527 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1528
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001529- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1530
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001531- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1532
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001533- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1534 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1535
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001536- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1537 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1538 type pattern with the same value exists.
1539
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001540- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1541 when run from the command prompt).
1542
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001543- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1544 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1545
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001546- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1547 default sort).
1548
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001549- Added global runctx function to profile module
1550
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001551- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1552
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001553- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1554
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001555- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1556
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001557- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001558 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1559 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1560 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1561 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1562 accordingly.
1563
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001564- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1565 decoding standards.
1566
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001567- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1568 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1569 called for all requests.
1570
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001571- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1572 they are passed to the compiler.
1573
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001574- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1575 indent, width and depth.
1576
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001577- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1578 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1579
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001580- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1581 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1582
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001583- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1584
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001585- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1586
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001587- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1588
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001589- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1590 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1591
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001592- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001593 for better performance.
1594
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001595- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001596
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001597- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1598 a string).
1599
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001600- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1601
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001602- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1603
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001604- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1605
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001606- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1607
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001608- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1609 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1610 list of fieldnames.
1611
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001612- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1613 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1614
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001615- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1616
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001617- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1618 empty lists.
1619
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001620- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1621 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1622 and shelves.
1623
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001624- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1625 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1626
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001627- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001628 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1629 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001630
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001631- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1632 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001633 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001634
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001635- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001636 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1637 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1638
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001639- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1640 and removed in Py2.4.
1641
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001642- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1643
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001644- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1645
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001646Tools/Demos
1647-----------
1648
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001649- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1650 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1651
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001652- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1653
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001654- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1655 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1656 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1657 destination in situations where both files are given.
1658
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001659- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1660 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1661 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1662 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1663
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001664- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1665
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001666- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1667 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1668 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1669 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1670 now.
1671
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001672- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1673 in effect
1674
1675- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1676 C-c C-h
1677
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001678- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1679 -d option was given.
1680
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001681Build
1682-----
1683
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001684- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1685 build under OS X.
1686
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001687- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1688 --enable-profiling.
1689
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001690- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1691 is configured --with-tsc.
1692
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001693- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1694 on AMD64.
1695
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001696- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1697 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1698
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001699- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1700 removed.
1701
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001702- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1703 supported (see PEP 11).
1704
1705- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1706
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001707- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1708
1709- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1710 (see PEP 11).
1711
1712- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1713 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1714
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001715C API
1716-----
1717
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001718- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1719 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1720 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1721
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001722- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1723 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1724 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1725 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1726
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001727- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1728 generator objects.
1729
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001730- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1731 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001732 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1733 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001734
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001735- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1736 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1737
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001738- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1739 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1740 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1741 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1742 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1743
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001744- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1745 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1746 about 10% faster.
1747
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001748- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1749 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1750
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001751- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1752 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1753 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1754 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1755
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001756Windows
1757-------
1758
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001759- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1760 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1761 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1762 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1763
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001764- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1765 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1766 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1767
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001768
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001769What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1770===============================
1771
1772*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1773
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001774IDLE
1775----
1776
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001777- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1778 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1779 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1780 context-menu actions.
1781
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001782- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1783 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1784 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1785 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1786 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1787 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1788 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1789 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1790 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1791
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001792
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001793What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1794=============================================
1795
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001796*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001797
1798Core and builtins
1799-----------------
1800
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001801- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001802 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001803 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1804
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001805Extension modules
1806-----------------
1807
1808- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1809 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1810 than once. This has been fixed.
1811
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001812- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1813 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1814 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1815 call.
1816
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001817- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1818
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001819Library
1820-------
1821
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001822- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1823 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1824
1825- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1826 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1827 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1828 restored.
1829
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001830IDLE
1831----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001832
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001833- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001834
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001835Build
1836-----
1837
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001838- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1839 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1840
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001841C API
1842-----
1843
1844Windows
1845-------
1846
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001847- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1848 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1849
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001850- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1851
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001852Mac
1853---
1854
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001855- Various fixes to pimp.
1856
1857- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1858
1859- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1860 more problems than it solves.
1861
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001862
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001863What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1864=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001865
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001866*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1867
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001868Core and builtins
1869-----------------
1870
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001871- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1872 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1873
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001874- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1875 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001876 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001877
1878- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1879 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1880 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001881 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001882
1883- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1884 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001885
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001886- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1887 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1888 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1889
1890- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001891 770247.
1892
1893- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001894
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001895Extension modules
1896-----------------
1897
1898- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1899 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1900
1901- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1902
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001903- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1904
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001905- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1906 contained within the _strptime module.
1907
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001908- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1909 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1910
1911- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001912 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1913
1914- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1915 the find_class attribute, if present.
1916
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001917- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001918
1919 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1920 (SF bug 763298).
1921
1922 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001923 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1924 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1925 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001926
1927 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1928
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001929Library
1930-------
1931
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001932- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1933
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001934- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1935 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1936 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1937 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1938 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1939 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1940 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1941 or Tester().
1942
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001943- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1944 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1945 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1946 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1947 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1948 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1949 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1950 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1951 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001952
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001953 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001954
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001955- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1956 weren't before was an oversight.
1957
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001958- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1959 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1960
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001961- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1962 when there are no lines.
1963
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001964- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1965 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1966
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001967- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1968 to child processes.
1969
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001970- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1971
1972- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1973
1974- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1975 xmlrpclib.
1976
1977- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1978 responses.
1979
1980- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1981 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1982
1983- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1984 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1985 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1986
1987- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1988 used as patterns.
1989
1990- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1991 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1992 than Tk 8.3.
1993
1994- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1995
1996- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001997
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001998Tools/Demos
1999-----------
2000
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002001- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2002
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002003- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2004
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002005- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002006
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002007Build
2008-----
2009
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002010- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2011
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002012- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2013
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002014- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2015 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002016
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002017- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2018 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2019 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002020
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002021C API
2022-----
2023
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002024- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2025 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2026
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002027Windows
2028-------
2029
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002030- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2031 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2032 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2033 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2034 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2035 Python exception ::
2036
2037 thread.error: can't start new thread
2038
2039 is raised now.
2040
2041- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2042 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2043 instead of from DLL teardown.
2044
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002045Mac
2046---
2047
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002048- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002049 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002050 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2051 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2052 the executable in the bundle.
2053
2054- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002055
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002056- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2057
2058- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2059 on Panther.
2060
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002061What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2062================================
2063
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002064*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002065
2066Core and builtins
2067-----------------
2068
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002069- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2070 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2071 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2072 with the -i option.
2073
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002074- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2075 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2076
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002077- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2078 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2079
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002080- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2081 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2082 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2083 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2084 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2085 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2086 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2087 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2088 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2089 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2090 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2091 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2092 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002093
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002094- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2095 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2096 embedded in a lambda expression.
2097
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002098- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2099 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2100 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2101 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2102 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2103
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002104- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2105 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2106 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2107
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002108- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2109 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2110
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002111- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2112 It's writable again.
2113
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002114- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2115 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2116 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002117 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002118
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002119- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2120 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2121 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2122
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002123Extension modules
2124-----------------
2125
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002126- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2127 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2128
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002129- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2130 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2131 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2132 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2133
2134- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2135 collection.
2136
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002137- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2138 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2139 unique within a single program run.
2140
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002141- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2142 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2143
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002144- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2145 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2146
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002147- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2148 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002149
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002150- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2151
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002152- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2153 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2154
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002155- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2156 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2157 for many BSD-derived systems.
2158
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002159
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002160Library
2161-------
2162
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002163- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2164 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2165 primary ones:
2166
2167 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2168 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2169 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2170
2171 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2172 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2173 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2174 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2175 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2176 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2177
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002178- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2179 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2180 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2181 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2182 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2183 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2184 argument.
2185
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002186- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2187 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2188 in the archive.
2189
2190- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2191 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2192
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002193- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2194 569574).
2195
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002196- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2197 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2198 no more.
2199
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002200- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2201 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2202 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2203 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2204 code coverage.
2205
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002206- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2207 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2208 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002209 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2210 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002211
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002212- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2213 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2214 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002215 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002216
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002217- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2218
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002219- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2220 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2221 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2222 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2223
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002224- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2225 handling.
2226
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002227- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2228 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2229
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002230- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2231 in socket.py.
2232
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002233- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2234
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002235- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2236 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2237 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2238 opener with proxy support.
2239
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002240- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2241
2242- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2243
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002244Tools/Demos
2245-----------
2246
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002247- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2248
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002249- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2250
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002251- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2252 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002253
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002254- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2255 files.
2256
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002257Build
2258-----
2259
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002260- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002261 different root directory.
2262
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002263C API
2264-----
2265
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002266- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2267 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2268 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2269 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2270 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2271 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2272 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2273 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2274 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2275 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2276
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002277- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2278 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2279 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2280 from Python.
2281
2282
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002283New platforms
2284-------------
2285
2286None this time.
2287
2288Tests
2289-----
2290
2291- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2292 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2293
2294Windows
2295-------
2296
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002297- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2298
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002299- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2300 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2301 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2302 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2303 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2304 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2305 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2306 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2307 that's what it's for.
2308
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002309Mac
2310---
2311
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002312- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2313 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2314 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2315 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002316- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2317 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2318- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002319
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002320SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2321------------------------------------
2322
2323430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2324598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2325622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2326661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2327683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2328697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2329713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2330724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2331727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2332729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2333730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2334731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2335732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2336733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2337735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2338740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2339744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2340745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2341747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2342749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2343751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2344753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2345755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2346757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2347760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2348
2349
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002350What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2351================================
2352
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002353*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002354
2355Core and builtins
2356-----------------
2357
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002358- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2359 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2360
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002361- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2362 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2363 and cannot be strings).
2364
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002365- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2366 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2367 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2368 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2369
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002370- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2371 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2372 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2373 Python itself.
2374
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002375- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2376 the referenced object, if it has one.
2377
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002378- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2379 the thread started at
2380 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2381
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002382- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2383 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2384 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2385 placed on a list index.
2386
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002387- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2388 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2389 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2390 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2391
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002392- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2393 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2394 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2395 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2396 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2397 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2398 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2399
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002400- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2401 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2402 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2403 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2404 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2405
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002406- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2407 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002408
2409- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2410 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2411 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2412 #693195.)
2413
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002414- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2415 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002416
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002417- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002418 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002419 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2420 interpreter executions, would fail.
2421
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002422- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002423 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002424 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002425
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002426Extension modules
2427-----------------
2428
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002429- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2430 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2431 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2432 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2433
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002434- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2435 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2436
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002437- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2438 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2439 and Greg Chapman.)
2440
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002441- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2442 recursively.
2443
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002444- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002445 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2446 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2447 leaks.
2448
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002449- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2450
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002451- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2452 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2453 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2454 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2455 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2456 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2457 #705836.
2458
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002459- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002460 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2461
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002462- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2463 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2464 See SF bug #692416.
2465
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002466- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2467 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2468
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002469- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2470 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2471 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002472
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002473- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002474 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2475 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2476
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002477- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2478 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2479 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2480 timeouts to work properly.
2481
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002482Library
2483-------
2484
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002485- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2486 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2487 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2488 future release.
2489
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002490- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2491 for querying platform dependent features.
2492
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002493- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002494
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002495- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2496 pickle protocol versions.
2497
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002498- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2499 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2500 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2501
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002502- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2503
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002504- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2505 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2506 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2507 modules.
2508
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002509- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2510 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2511 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2512
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002513- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2514 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2515
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002516- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2517 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2518 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2519
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002520- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002521 MS Office extensions.
2522
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002523- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2524 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2525
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002526- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2527 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2528
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002529- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2530 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2531 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2532 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2533 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2534 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2535
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002536- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2537 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2538 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002539
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002540- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2541 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2542 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2543
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002544- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2545
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002546- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2547 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2548 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2549
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002550Tools/Demos
2551-----------
2552
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002553- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2554 See the module docstring for details.
2555
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002556Build
2557-----
2558
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002559- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2560 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002561
2562C API
2563-----
2564
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002565- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2566
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002567- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2568 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2569 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2570
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002571- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2572 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002573
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002574 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2575 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2576 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002577
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002578- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002579 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2580
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002581- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2582 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2583 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002584
2585New platforms
2586-------------
2587
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002588None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002589
2590Tests
2591-----
2592
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002593- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2594 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002595
2596Windows
2597-------
2598
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002599- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2600 function.
2601
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002602- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2603 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002604
2605Mac
2606---
2607
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002608- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2609 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002610
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002611- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2612 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002613
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002614- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2615 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2616 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002617
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002618- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002619 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2620 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002621
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002622- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2623 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002624
2625
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002626What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2627=================================
2628
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002629*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002630
2631Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002632-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002633
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002634- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2635 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2636 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2637
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002638- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2639 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2640 (SF patch #664376.)
2641
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002642- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2643 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2644 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2645 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2646 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2647 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002648 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002649
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002650- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2651 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2652 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2653 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002654 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002655
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002656- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2657 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2658 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2659 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2660 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2661 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2662 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2663 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2664 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2665 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2666 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2667
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002668- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2669 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2670 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2671 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2672 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2673 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2674
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002675- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2676 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2677
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002678- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2679 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2680 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2681 case.)
2682
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002683- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2684 passed as unicode strings.
2685
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002686- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2687 See SF bug #683467.
2688
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002689- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2690 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2691
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002692- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2693
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002694- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2695
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002696- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2697 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2698 arguments.
2699
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002700- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2701 See SF bug #667147.
2702
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002703- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002704 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002705 See SF bug #676155.
2706
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002707- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002708 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002709 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2710 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2711 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2712 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2713 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2714 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002715
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002716Extension modules
2717-----------------
2718
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002719- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2720 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2721 tp_as_number pointer.
2722
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002723- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2724 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2725 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2726 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2727 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2728
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002729- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2730
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002731- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2732
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002733- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002734 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002735 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2736 patch #678531.)
2737
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002738- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2739 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2740
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002741- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2742 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2743
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002744- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2745
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002746- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2747 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2748 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2749
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002750- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2751
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002752- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2753 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2754
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002755- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002756
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002757- datetime changes:
2758
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002759 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2760
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002761 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2762 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2763 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2764 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2765 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2766 now.
2767
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002768 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002769 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2770 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002771
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002772 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002773 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002774 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2775 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2776 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2777 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002778
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002779 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2780 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2781 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002782 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2783
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002784 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2785 by a later example coded by Guido.
2786
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002787 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002788 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2789 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2790 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002791 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2792 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2793
2794 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2795 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2796 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2797 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2798 tzinfo subclass instance.
2799
2800 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2801 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2802 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2803 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2804 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2805 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2806 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2807 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002808
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002809 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2810 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2811 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2812 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2813 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002814 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2815
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002816 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002817
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002818 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2819 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2820 as a naive datetime object.
2821
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002822 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2823 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2824 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2825
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002826 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2827 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2828 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2829 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2830 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2831 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2832 comparison.
2833
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002834 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2835 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2836 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2837 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002838 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002839
2840 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002841
2842 and ::
2843
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002844 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2845
2846 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2847 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2848 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2849 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2850
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002851 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2852 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2853 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2854 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2855 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2856
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002857 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2858 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002859 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2860 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002861
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002862Library
2863-------
2864
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002865- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2866 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2867
2868- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2869 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2870 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2871 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2872 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2873 See PEP 307 for details.
2874
2875- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2876 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2877
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002878- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2879 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002880 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002881 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2882 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002883 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002884
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002885- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2886 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2887
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002888- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2889 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2890 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2891
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002892- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2893
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002894- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2895 exception.
2896
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002897- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2898 class.
2899
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002900- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2901 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2902 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2903
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002904- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2905 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2906
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002907- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002908 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2909 See SF bug #659228.
2910
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002911- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2912 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2913 See SF patch #651082.
2914
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002915- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002916
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002917- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2918 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2919
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002920- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002921 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002922
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002923- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2924 DOS paths from other platforms.
2925
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002926Tools/Demos
2927-----------
2928
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002929- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2930 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2931 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2932 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2933 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2934 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2935 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2936 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2937 example:
2938
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002939 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2940 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002941
2942 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2943
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002944
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002945Build
2946-----
2947
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002948- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2949 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2950 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002951 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2952
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002953 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2954
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002955- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2956 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2957 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2958 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2959 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2960 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2961 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2962 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2963 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2964
2965- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2966 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2967 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2968 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2969
2970- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2971 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2972
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002973C API
2974-----
2975
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002976- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2977 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002978
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002979- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2980 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2981 tp_as_number pointer.
2982
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002983- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2984 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2985 (SF #681367)
2986
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002987- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2988 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2989 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2990 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002991
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002992Tests
2993-----
2994
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002995- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002996 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2997 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2998 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2999 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3000 pydoc.)
3001
3002- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3003
3004- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003005
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003006Windows
3007-------
3008
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003009- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3010 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3011 time).
3012
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003013- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3014 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3015
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003016- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3017 release without strong cryptography.
3018
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003019- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003020 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003021
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003022- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3023 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3024
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003025Mac
3026---
3027
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003028- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3029 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003030
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003031- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3032 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3033 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003034
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003035- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3036 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003037
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003038- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3039 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3040 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3041 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003042
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003043- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003044 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3045 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3046 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003047
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003048
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003049What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003050=================================
3051
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003052*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003053
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003054Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003055--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003056
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003057- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3058
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003059- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3060 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003061 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003062 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003063 a different meaning than before.
3064
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003065- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003066 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003067 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003068
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003069- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003070 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003071 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003072
3073- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3074 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3075 and deallocation.
3076
3077- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3078 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3079
3080- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3081 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3082 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3083 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3084 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3085
3086- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3087 now detected by the garbage collector.
3088
3089- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3090 [SF bug 519621]
3091
3092- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3093 identifier.
3094
3095- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3096 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3097 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3098 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3099 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3100 [SF bug 563060]
3101
3102- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3103 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3104 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3105 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3106 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3107
3108- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3109 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3110 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3111
3112- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3113
3114- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3115 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3116 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3117 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3118 state of the slots would be lost.)
3119
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003120Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003121-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003122
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003123- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003124 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3125 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3126 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3127 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003128 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3129 Jython 2.1.
3130
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003131- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003132 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003133 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3134 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3135 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3136 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3137 these, see PEP 302.
3138
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003139- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3140 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3141 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3142
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003143- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3144 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3145 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3146
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003147- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3148 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3149 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3150
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003151- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3152 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3153 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3154 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3155 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3156 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3157 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3158 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3159 releases or implementations.
3160
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003161- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003162 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3163 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003164
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003165- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3166 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3167
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003168- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3169 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3170 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3171
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003172- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3173 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3174
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003175- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3176 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003177 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3178 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003179
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003180- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3181 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3182 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3183 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3184 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3185
3186 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3187 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3188 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3189 pattern.
3190
3191 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3192 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3193 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3194 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3195
3196 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3197 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3198 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3199 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3200 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3201 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3202
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003203- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3204 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3205 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3206 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3207 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3208 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3209 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3210 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003211
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003212- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3213 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3214 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3215 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3216 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003217 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3218 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3219 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3220 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3221 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3222 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3223 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003224
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003225- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3226 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3227
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003228- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3229 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3230 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3231 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3232 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3233 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3234 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3235 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3236 to Zack Weinberg!
3237
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003238- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3239 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3240 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3241 type. This has been fixed now.
3242
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003243- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3244 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3245 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3246
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003247- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3248 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3249 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3250 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3251 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3252 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3253 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3254 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003255 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003256
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003257- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3258 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3259 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003260
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003261- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3262 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3263 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3264 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3265 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3266 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3267 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3268 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003269 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003270 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3271 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3272
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003273- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3274 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3275 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3276 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3277 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3278 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3279 this.)
3280
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003281- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3282 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003283 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003284 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003285 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3286 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003287 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3288 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003289
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003290- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3291 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3292 currently running.
3293
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003294- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3295 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3296 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3297 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3298
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003299- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3300 as directory names.
3301
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003302- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3303 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3304
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003305- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3306 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3307
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003308- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003309 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3310 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003311
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003312- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3313 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3314 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3315 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3316 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3317
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003318- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3319 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3320 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3321 removed.
3322
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003323- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3324 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3325 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3326
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003327- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3328 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3329 to __debug__.
3330
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003331- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3332 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3333 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3334
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003335- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3336 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3337 deprecated now.
3338
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003339- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3340 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3341 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003342
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003343- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3344 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3345 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3346 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3347 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003348
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003349- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3350 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3351
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003352- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3353 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3354 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003355 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003356 is backward compatible.
3357
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003358- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3359 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3360 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3361 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3362 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3363
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003364- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3365 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3366 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3367 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3368 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3369 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003370
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003371- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3372 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3373
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003374- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3375 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3376
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003377- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3378 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3379 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3380 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3381 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3382
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003383- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3384 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3385 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3386
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003387- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003388 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3389
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003390- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3391 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3392 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003393
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003394- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3395 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3396
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003397- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3398 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3399 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3400
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003401- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3402
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003403Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003404-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003405
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003406- Added three operators to the operator module:
3407 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3408 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3409 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3410
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003411- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3412
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003413- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3414 archives.
3415
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003416- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3417 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3418 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3419
3420 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3421
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003422- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3423 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3424 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003425 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003426
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003427- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3428 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3429 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3430 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003431 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3432 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3433 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3434 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003435
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003436- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3437 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003438
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003439- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3440
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003441- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3442 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3443
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003444- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3445 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3446 supported.
3447
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003448- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3449
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003450- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3451 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003452
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003453- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3454 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3455
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003456- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3457
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003458- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3459 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3460
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003461- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3462 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3463 functions but callable type objects.
3464
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003465- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003466 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003467 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003468
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003469- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3470 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003471
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003472- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3473 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003474
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003475- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3476 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3477 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3478 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3479
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003480- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3481 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003482
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003483- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3484 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3485 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3486 and __imul__.
3487
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003488- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003489 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3490 is called.
3491
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003492- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3493 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3494 interpreter was compiled.
3495
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003496- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3497 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3498 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003499 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003500 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3501 1, not 2.
3502
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003503- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3504 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3505 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3506 limit.
3507
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003508- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3509 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3510 bug #623464.
3511
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003512- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3513 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3514 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3515 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3516
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003517Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003518-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003519
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003520- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3521
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003522- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3523 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3524 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3525 with Python 2.3a2.
3526
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003527- os.path exposes getctime.
3528
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003529- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003530 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003531 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003532 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003533 unit tests of floating point results.
3534
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003535- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3536 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3537 has been increased.
3538
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003539- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3540 executed.
3541
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003542- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3543 postinstallation script.
3544
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003545- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3546 test the current module.
3547
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003548- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003549 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3550 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3551 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3552 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3553
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003554- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003555 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003556 Ward's Optik package.
3557
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003558- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3559 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3560 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3561 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3562
3563- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3564 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003565 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003566
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003567- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3568 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3569 shelf are binary pickles.
3570
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003571- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3572 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3573
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003574- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3575 modules are iterators now.
3576
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003577- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3578 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3579 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3580 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3581 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3582 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003583
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003584- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3585 with their entity value.
3586
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003587- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3588
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003589- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3590 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003591
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003592- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3593 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003594 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003595
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003596- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3597 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3598 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3599 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3600 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3601 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3602 main():
3603
3604 import locale
3605 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3606
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003607- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3608 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3609
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003610- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3611 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3612 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3613 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3614 to the new standard.
3615
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003616- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3617 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3618 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3619 an extension to the database.
3620
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003621- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3622 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3623 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3624 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003625 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003626
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003627- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003628 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003629
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003630- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3631 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3632 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3633 bounded integers.
3634
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003635- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3636 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3637 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3638 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3639 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3640 in existence.
3641
3642 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3643 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3644 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3645 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3646 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3647 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3648
3649 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3650 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3651 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3652 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3653
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003654- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3655 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3656 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3657
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003658- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3659
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003660- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3661 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3662 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3663 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3664
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003665- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3666 argument.
3667
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003668- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3669 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3670 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3671 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3672 [SF patch 560794].
3673
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003674- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3675 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3676 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003677 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3678 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3679 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003680
3681- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3682 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003683
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003684- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3685 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3686 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3687 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003688
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003689- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3690 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3691 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3692 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3693 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3694
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003695- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003696
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003697- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3698
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003699- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3700 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3701 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3702 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3703 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3704 identical to None.
3705
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003706- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3707 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3708 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3709 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3710 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3711 results now.
3712
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003713- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3714 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3715
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003716- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3717 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3718 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3719 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3720 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3721 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3722 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3723 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3724
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003725- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3726
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003727- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3728 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3729
3730- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3731 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3732 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3733 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3734 and other systems.
3735
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003736- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3737 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3738 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3739 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 +00003740 work well with these.
3741
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003742- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3743
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003744- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003745 connections.
3746
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003747- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3748 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3749 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3750
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003751- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3752 sets
3753
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003754- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3755 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3756 name.
3757
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003758- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3759 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3760 passed in.
3761
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003762- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003763 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003764 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3765 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003766
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003767- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3768
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003769- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3770
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003771- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3772 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3773 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3774
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003775- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3776 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3777 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3778 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003779 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003780
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003781- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003782 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003783 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003784
3785- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3786 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3787 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3788
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003789- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003790 the value of its expression argument.
3791
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003792- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3793 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3794 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3795
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003796- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3797 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3798 skipstone browser was included.
3799
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003800- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3801 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3802
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003803Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003804-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003805
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003806- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3807 names in addition to accepting file names.
3808
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003809- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3810 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3811 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3812 still used and useful.)
3813
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003814- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3815 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3816 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3817 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003818
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003819- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3820 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3821 the generated binary.
3822
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003823Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003824-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003825
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003826- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3827
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003828- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3829 except in the hands of experts.
3830
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003831- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003832 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3833 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3834 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003835
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003836- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3837 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3838 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3839 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3840 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3841 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3842 builds.
3843
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003844- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3845 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3846 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3847 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3848 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3849 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3850 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3851 new type.
3852
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003853- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003854
3855 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3856 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3857 positive infinities.
3858
3859 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3860 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3861 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3862 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3863 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3864 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3865 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3866
3867 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3868
3869 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3870
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003871- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3872 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3873 size of the executable.
3874
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003875- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3876 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3877 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3878 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003879
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003880- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3881
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003882- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3883 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3884 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003885
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003886- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3887 well as Unix.
3888
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003889- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3890 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3891 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3892 modules in the README file for details.
3893
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003894C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003895-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003896
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003897- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3898 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003899 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003900 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003901 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003902
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003903- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3904 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3905 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3906 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3907 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3908 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003909 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003910 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3911 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3912 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3913 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3914 aligned.)
3915
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003916- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3917 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3918 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3919
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003920- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3921 level.
3922
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003923- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3924 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3925 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3926 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3927 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3928
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003929- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3930 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3931 code.
3932
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003933- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3934 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3935 adjusting for negative indices.
3936
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003937- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3938 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3939 object.
3940
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003941- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3942 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3943 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3944
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003945- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3946 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003947
3948- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3949
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003950- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3951 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3952 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3953 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3954
3955- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3956
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003957- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003958
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003959- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003960 without going through the buffer API.
3961
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003962- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003963
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003964- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3965 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3966 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3967 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3968
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003969- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3970 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3971
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003972- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003973 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3974
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003975New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003976-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003977
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003978- OpenVMS is now supported.
3979
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003980- AtheOS is now supported.
3981
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003982- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3983
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003984- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3985
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003986Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003987-----
3988
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003989- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3990 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3991 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003992
3993Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003994-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003995
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003996- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3997 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3998 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3999 bugs.
4000 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004001 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004002 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4003 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004004 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004005
4006- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004007 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004008
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004009- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4010 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4011
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004012- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4013 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004014 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004015 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4016
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004017- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4018 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4019 use files" uninstall option).
4020
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004021- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4022
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004023- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4024 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4025
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004026- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4027 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4028 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4029
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004030- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4031 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4032 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4033 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4034 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004035 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4036 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4037 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004038
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004039- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004040 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004041 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4042 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4043 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4044 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4045 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4046 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4047 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4048 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4049 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4050 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4051 work around.
4052
4053- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4054 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4055 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4056 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4057 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4058 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4059 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4060 specified with O_CREAT too).
4061
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004062Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004063----
4064
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004065- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004066
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004067- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4068 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4069 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4070
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004071- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4072 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4073 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4074
4075- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4076 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4077 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4078 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4079 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4080 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4081 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4082 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004083
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004084- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4085 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4086 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004087
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004088- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4089 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4090 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4091 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4092 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004093
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004094- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4095 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4096 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004097
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004098- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4099 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004100
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004101- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4102 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4103 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4104 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4105 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004106
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004107- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4108 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4109 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4110
4111- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4112 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4113 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004114
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004115- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4116 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4117 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4118 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004119 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004120
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004121- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4122 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004123
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004124- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4125 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004126
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004127- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004128 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004129 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4130 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004131
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004132
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004133What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004134===============================
4135
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004136*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4137
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004138Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004139--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004140
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004141- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4142 with a custom metaclass.
4143
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004144Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004145-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004146
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004147- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4148 are proxies.
4149
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004150Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004151-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004152
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004153- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4154 very short strings.
4155
4156- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4157 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4158 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4159 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4160 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4161
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004162Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004163-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004164
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004165- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4166 close or delete time).
4167
4168- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4169 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4170
4171- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4172
4173- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004174 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004175
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004176Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004177-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004178
4179Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004180-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004181
4182C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004183-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004184
4185New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004186-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004187
4188Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004189-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004190
4191Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004192-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004193
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004194- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4195
4196- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4197 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4198
4199- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4200 deleted at process exit time.
4201
4202- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4203 in backslash.
4204
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004205Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004206----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004207
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004208- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4209 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4210 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4211
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004212
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004213What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004214===========================
4215
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004216*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4217
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004218Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004219--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004220
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004221- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4222 been extensively updated. See
4223
4224 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4225
4226 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4227
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004228- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4229 deleted!
4230
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004231- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4232 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4233 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4234 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4235 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4236
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004237- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4238
4239 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4240 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4241
4242 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4243 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4244 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4245 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4246 supported anyway.
4247
4248 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4249 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4250
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004251- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4252 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4253 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4254 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4255 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004256
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004257- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4258 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4259 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4260
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004261Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004262-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004263
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004264- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4265 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4266 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4267 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4268 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4269 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004270 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4271 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4272 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4273 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004274
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004275- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4276 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4277 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4278
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004279Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004280-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004281
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004282- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4283
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004284Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004285-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004286
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004287- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4288 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4289 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4290 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4291 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4292 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4293
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004294- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4295
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004296- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4297
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004298- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4299
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004300- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4301 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4302 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4303
4304- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4305
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004306Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004307-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004308
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004309- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4310 off a search on Google.
4311
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004312Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004313-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004314
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004315- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4316 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4317 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4318 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4319 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4320 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4321 other platforms should do likewise.
4322
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004323- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4324 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4325 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4326
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004327C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004328-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004329
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004330- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4331 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4332 producing key-value pairs.
4333
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004334- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004335 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004336 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4337 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4338 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4339 previously went unchallenged.
4340
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004341New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004342-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004343
4344Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004345-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004346
4347Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004348-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004349
4350Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004351----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004352
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004353- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4354 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004355
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004356- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4357 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4358 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4359 home.
4360
4361
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004362What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004363===========================
4364
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004365*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4366
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004367Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004368--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004369
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004370- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4371 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004372
4373 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004374 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004375
4376 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4377 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004378 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004379 This needs to be documented.
4380
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004381- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4382 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4383
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004384- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4385 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4386 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4387
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004388- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4389 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4390
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004391- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4392 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4393 class forbids it).
4394
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004395- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4396 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4397 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4398
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004399- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4400
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004401Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004402-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004403
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004404- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4405 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004406 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004407
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004408- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4409 (like 1 + '').
4410
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004411Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004412-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004413
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004414- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4415 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4416 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4417 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004418 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004419 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4420
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004421- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4422 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4423 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4424 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4425
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004426- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4427 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004428 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4429 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4430 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004431
4432- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4433 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004434
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004435- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4436 bytes on its input.
4437
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004438Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004439-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004440
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004441- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004442 convenience function.
4443
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004444- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4445 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4446 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004447 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4448 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4449 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4450 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4451 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4452 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004453
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004454- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4455 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4456 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4457 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4458
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004459- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4460 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4461 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4462
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004463- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4464 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4465 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4466 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4467
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004468- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4469 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004470 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004471 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4472 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4473 new -l and -e options.
4474
4475- statcache is now deprecated.
4476
4477- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4478 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004479 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004480 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4481 time properly taken into account.
4482
4483- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4484 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4485 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4486 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4487
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004488Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004489-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004490
4491Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004492-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004493
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004494- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4495 is built with libdb3 if available.
4496
4497- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4498
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004499C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004500-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004501
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004502- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4503 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4504 PySequence_Size().
4505
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004506- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4507
4508- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4509 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4510 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4511
4512- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4513 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4514
4515- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4516 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4517
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004518New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004519-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004520
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004521- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4522 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4523
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004524- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4525 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4526
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004527- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4528
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004529Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004530-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004531
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004532- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4533 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4534
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004535Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004536-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004537
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004538Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004539----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004540
4541- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4542 removed completely in the next release.
4543
4544- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4545 OSX.
4546
4547- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4548 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4549
4550- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4551
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004552
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004553What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004554===========================
4555
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004556*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4557
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004558Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004559--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004560
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004561- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004562 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004563 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004564 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4565 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004566 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4567 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004568 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4569 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004570
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004571- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4572 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4573
4574- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4575 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4576
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004577Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004578-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004579
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004580- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4581 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4582 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4583 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4584 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4585 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4586 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4587 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4588
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004589- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4590 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4591 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4592 example).
4593
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004594- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004595 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004596 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004597 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004598
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004599- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4600 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4601 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004602 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004603
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004604- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4605 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4606 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4607 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4608 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4609 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4610
4611 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4612
4613 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4614
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004615Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004616-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004617
4618- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4619
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004620- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4621
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004622- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4623 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004624
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004625- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4626 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4627 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4628 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4629 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4630 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004631 attributes.
4632
4633- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4634 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4635 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004636
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004637- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4638 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4639 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004640
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004641- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4642 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4643 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004644 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4645 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4646
4647- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4648 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004649
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004650Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004651-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004652
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004653- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4654 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4655
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004656- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4657 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4658 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4659 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4660
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004661- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4662 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4663 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4664 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4665
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004666 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4667 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4668 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4669 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4670 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4671 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4672 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4673 without losing information).
4674
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004675- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004676 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4677 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4678 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4679 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4680 module).
4681
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004682 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004683 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4684 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4685 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4686 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004687
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004688- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004689 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4690 encoding.
4691
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004692- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4693 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4694
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004695- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004696 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4697
4698- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4699 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4700 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4701 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4702
4703- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4704
4705- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4706 ON, and OFF.
4707
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004708- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4709 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4710
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004711Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004712-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004713
4714- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4715 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4716 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004717
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004718- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4719 been added: -X and -E.
4720
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004721Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004722-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004723
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004724- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4725 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4726
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004727C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004728-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004729
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004730- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4731 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4732 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4733 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4734 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4735
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004736- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4737 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4738 as long) arguments.
4739
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004740- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4741 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4742 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4743 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4744 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4745 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4746
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004747- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4748 input.
4749
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004750New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004751-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004752
4753Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004754-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004755
4756Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004757-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004758
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004759- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4760 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4761 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4762
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004763- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4764 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4765 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004766 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004767
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004768 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4769 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4770 import signal
4771 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004772
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004773 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004774 while 1:
4775 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004776 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004777 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4778 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4779 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4780 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004781
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004782
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004783What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4784===========================
4785
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004786*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4787
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004788Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004789--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004790
4791- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4792 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4793 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4794
4795- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4796 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4797 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4798 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4799 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4800 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4801 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004802
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004803- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004804 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004805 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4806 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4807 associate a docstring with a property.
4808
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004809- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4810 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4811 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4812 other built-in object types.
4813
4814- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4815 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4816 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4817 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4818 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4819
4820- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4821 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4822
4823- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4824 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004825 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004826 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4827 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4828 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4829 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4830 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4831
4832- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4833 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4834 class.
4835
4836- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4837 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4838 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4839 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4840
4841- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4842 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4843 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4844 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4845
4846- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4847 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4848
4849- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4850 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4851 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4852 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4853 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004854 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004855 with the same value as s.
4856
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004857- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4858
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004859Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004860----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004861
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004862- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4863
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004864- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4865 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4866 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4867 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4868 objects.
4869
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004870- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4871 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004872 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4873 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4874
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004875- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4876 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4877 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4878
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004879Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004880-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004881
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004882- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4883 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4884 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4885 by the instances.
4886
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004887- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4888 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4889 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4890
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004891- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4892 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4893 before the entire comparison is complete.
4894
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004895- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4896 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4897 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4898
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004899- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4900 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4901 getwriter().
4902
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004903- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4904 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4905
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004906- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004907 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4908 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4909
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004910- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4911 iterable object.
4912
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004913- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4914 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004915
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004916- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4917 authentication.
4918
4919- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4920 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004921
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004922- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004923 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4924 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4925 a sample driver.)
4926
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004927Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004928-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004929
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004930- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4931 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4932 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4933 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4934 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4935 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4936 kernel has large file support.
4937
4938- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4939 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4940 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4941 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4942 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4943
4944- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4945 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4946 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4947
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004948C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004949-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004950
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004951- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4952 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4953
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004954New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004955-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004956
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004957- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4958 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4959
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004960Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004961-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004962
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004963- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4964 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4965 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4966 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4967 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4968
4969- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4970 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4971 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4972 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4973
4974- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4975 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4976
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004977Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004978-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004979
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004980- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004981 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4982 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004983
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004984
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004985What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4986===========================
4987
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004988*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4989
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004990Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004991----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004992
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004993- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4994 big to represent as a C double.
4995
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004996- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4997 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4998 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4999 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5000 restriction).
5001
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005002- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5003 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5004 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5005 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5006 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5007
5008 >>> dir([])
5009 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5010 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5011 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5012 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5013 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5014 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5015 'reverse', 'sort']
5016
5017 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5018
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005019- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005020 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5021 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5022 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5023 OverflowError exception.
5024
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005025- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005026 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005027 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5028 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5029 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5030 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5031 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005032 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005033 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5034 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5035
5036 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5037 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5038 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5039 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005040
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005041- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005042 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5043 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5044 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5045 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5046 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5047 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5048 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5049 once it is created.
5050
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005051- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5052 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5053 (key, value) pairs.
5054
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005055- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005056 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5057 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5058
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005059- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5060 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5061 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5062 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5063 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005064
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005065- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005066 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5067 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5068
5069 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5070
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005071- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005072 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5073
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005074Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005075-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005076
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005077- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005078 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5079 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005080
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005081- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5082 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5083 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5084 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5085 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5086 in this area anymore).
5087
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005088- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5089 threading.Timer.
5090
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005091- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5092 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5093
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005094- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005095 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5096
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005097- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005098 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5099 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5100 converted to Python longs.
5101
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005102- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005103 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5104
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005105- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5106 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5107 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5108
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005109Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005110-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005111
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005112- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5113 division operators as per PEP 238.
5114
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005115Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005116-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005117
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005118- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5119 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5120 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5121 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5122
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005123C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005124-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005125
5126- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005127
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005128- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5129 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005130 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005131
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005132 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5133 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005134 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005135 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005136
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005137- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005138 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5139 module:
5140
5141 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005142
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005143 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5144 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005145
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005146 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5147 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005148
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005149 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5150
5151 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5152
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005153- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005154 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5155 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5156 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005157
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005158New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005159-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005160
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005161- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5162 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5163 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5164 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5165 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005166
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005167Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005168-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005169
5170Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005171-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005172
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005173- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5174 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5175 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5176 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005177 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5178 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5179 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5180 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5181 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005182
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005183- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005184 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5185
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005186
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005187What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5188===========================
5189
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005190*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5191
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005192Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005193-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005194
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005195- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5196 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5197
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005198- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5199 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5200 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005201
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005202- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5203 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5204 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5205 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005206
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005207- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5208
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005209- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005210
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005211Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005212-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005213
5214- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005215 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005216 the module docstring for details.
5217
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005218Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005219-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005220
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005221- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005222 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5223 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5224 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005225
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005226- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5227 Nick Mathewson.
5228
5229Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005230----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005231
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005232- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5233 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5234 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5235 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5236 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5237 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5238 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5239 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5240
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005241- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5242 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5243 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5244 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5245
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005246- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5247 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5248 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5249 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5250 come a long way).
5251
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005252- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5253 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5254 write filters for these warnings).
5255
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005256- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5257 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5258 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5259 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5260 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5261
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005262- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5263 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5264 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5265 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5266 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5267 older distribution.
5268
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005269Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005270-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005271
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005272- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5273 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005274 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005275
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005276- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5277 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5278 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5279
5280- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5281
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005282- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5283
5284- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5285
5286- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5287
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005288- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005289
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005290- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5291
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005292New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005293-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005294
5295C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005296-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005297
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005298- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5299 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5300 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5301 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5302 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5303 against buffer overruns.
5304
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005305- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005306 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5307 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005308 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5309 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5310 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5311
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005312- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5313 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5314 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5315 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5316 deprecated.
5317
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005318Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005319-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005320
5321- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5322 relevant is found.
5323
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005324
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005325What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005326===========================
5327
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005328*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5329
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005330Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005331----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005332
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005333- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5334 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5335 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5336 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5337 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5338 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5339 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5340 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005341 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005342 repaired.
5343
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005344- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005345 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005346 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5347 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5348 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5349 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5350 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5351 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5352 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5353 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5354
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005355- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5356 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5357 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5358 leading BMO character).
5359
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005360- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5361 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5362 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5363
5364 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5365 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5366 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005367
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005368 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5369 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5370 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5371 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5372 for various simple to use conversions.
5373
5374 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5375 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5376
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005377 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5378 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5379 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5380 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5381 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5382 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5383 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5384 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5385 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5386 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5387 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5388 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5389 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5390 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5391 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005392
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005393- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5394 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5395 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005396 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005397 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005398
5399 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005400 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5401 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5402 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5403 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5404 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005405 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5406 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005407
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005408 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5409 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5410 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005411 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005412
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005413- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5414 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5415 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5416 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5417 floating arithmetic,
5418
5419 x = 9007199254740992.0
5420 print long(x)
5421
5422 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5423 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5424 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5425 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5426 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5427 functions are of good quality).
5428
5429 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5430 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5431 algorithms to break.
5432
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005433- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5434 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5435 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5436 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5437 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5438 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5439 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5440 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5441 order.
5442
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005443- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5444 operation along the most common code paths.
5445
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005446- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5447 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5448
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005449- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5450 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5451 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5452 {}.update(UserDict())
5453
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005454- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5455 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5456 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5457 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5458 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5459 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5460 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5461 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5462
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005463- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005464 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005465
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005466 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005467 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5468 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005469 join() method of strings
5470 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005471 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5472 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005473 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005474 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005475
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005476- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5477 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5478
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005479- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5480 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5481
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005482- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5483 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5484 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5485 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5486
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005487- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5488 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005489 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005490 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5491 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005492
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005493- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5494
5495
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005496Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005497-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005498
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005499- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005500 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005501 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5502 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5503
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005504- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5505 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5506
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005507- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5508 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5509 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5510 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5511
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005512- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5513 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5514 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5515
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005516- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5517
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005518- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5519
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005520- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5521 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5522 that are still imported into string.py).
5523
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005524- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5525
5526- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5527 Now it does.
5528
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005529- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5530
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005531- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5532 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5533 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5534 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5535 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005536 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5537 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005538
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005539- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5540 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5541 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5542 'help(object)'.
5543
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005544Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005545-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005546
5547- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005548 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005549 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5550 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5551
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005552- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005553 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5554 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005555
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005556C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005557-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005558
5559- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5560 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005561
5562----
5563
5564**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**