blob: 9144f5ddf17331caa104e4164263f1ceb593b4b4 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000015- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
16 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
17
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000018- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
19present).
20
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000021- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
22 codes.
23
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000024- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
25 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
26 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
27
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000028- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
29 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
30
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000031- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000032 (fixes bug #1119418).
33
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000034- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
35
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000036- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
37 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
38
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000039- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
40 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
41 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
42
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000043- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
44
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000045- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
46 reference counts in some error exit cases.
47
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000048- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
49 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
50 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
51 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
52 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
53 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
54 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
55 realloc.
56
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000057- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
58 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
59
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000060- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
61 like their int counterparts.
62
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000063- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
64 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
65 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
66 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
67 for a longer write-up of the problem).
68
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000069- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
70 serializing floats.
71
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000072- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
73 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
74 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
75
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000076- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
77 278.
78
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000079- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
80 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
81 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
82 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +000083 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000084 PyNumber_*().
85 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
86
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000087- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
88 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
89 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
90 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
91
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000092- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
93 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
94 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
95 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
96 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
97
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000098- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
99 disabled caused a crash.
100
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000101- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
102 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
103
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000104- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000105 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
106
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000107- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
108
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000109- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000110 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
111 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
112 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000113
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000114- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
115
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000116- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
117 returning None.
118
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000119- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000120 ('\') with a specific error message.
121
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000122- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
123
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000124- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
125 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
126
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000127- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000128 an ferror() call.
129
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000130- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
131 list.sort().
132
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000133- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
134 (2+3) --> (5).
135
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000136- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
137
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000138- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
139 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000140
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000141- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
142 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
143 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
144
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000145- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
146 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
147 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
148
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000149Extension Modules
150-----------------
151
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000152- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
153 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
154
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000155- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
156
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000157- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
158
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000159- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
160 the file system encoding.
161
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000162- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
163 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000164
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000165- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
166
167- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000168 line without newlines.
169
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000170- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
171 on Windows.
172
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000173- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
174 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
175
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000176- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
177 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
178 for large or negative values.
179
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000180- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000181 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000182
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000183- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
184
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000185- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
186 if available on the platform.
187
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000188- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
189 available on the platform.
190
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000191- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
192 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
193
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000194- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
195
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000196- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
197 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
198 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
199
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000200- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
201
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000202- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
203 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
204
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000205- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000206 file size.
207
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000208- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
209
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000210- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
211 {remove_history,replace_history}
212
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000213- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
214 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000215
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000216- stat_float_times is now True.
217
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000218- array.array objects are now picklable.
219
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000220- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
221 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
222
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000223- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
224 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
225 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
226
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000227- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
228 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000229
230Library
231-------
232
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000233- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
234 to get the correct encoding.
235
236- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
237 languages.
238
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000239- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
240
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000241- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
242
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000243- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
244
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000245- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
246 functionality.
247
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000248- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
249
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000250- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
251 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
252
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000253- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
254 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
255 match the Content-Length header.
256
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000257- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
258
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000259- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
260 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
261 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
262
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000263- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
264
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000265- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
266
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000267- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
268 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
269
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000270- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
271 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
272 Tkdnd.
273
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000274- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
275 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
276
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000277- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
278 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
279
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000280- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000281 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
282
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000283- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
284 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
285
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000286- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
287 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
288
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000289- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000290 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000291
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000292- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
293
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000294- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
295 error messages.
296
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000297- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
298
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000299- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
300 Bug #1224621.
301
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000302- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
303 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
304 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
305 terminates by raising StopIteration.
306
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000307- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
308
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000309- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
310 component of the path.
311
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000312- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
313 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
314 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
315 class at all.
316
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000317- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
318 files to PyPI.
319
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000320- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
321 them to PyPI.
322
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000323- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
324 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
325 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
326 work as expected.
327
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000328- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
329 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
330
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000331- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000332 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
333
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000334- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
335
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000336- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
337 to build.
338
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000339- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
340 symbolic links on Windows.
341
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000342- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000343 profile.py if available.
344
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000345- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
346
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000347- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
348 in LWPCookieJar.
349
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000350- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
351
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000352- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
353
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000354- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
355
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000356- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
357
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000358- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
359
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000360- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
361
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000362- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
363
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000364- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
365
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000366- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
367 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
368 be exploited in various ways.
369
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000370- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
371
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000372- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
373
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000374- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
375
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000376- Enhancements to the csv module:
377
378 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000379 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000380 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000381 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
382 reporting.
383 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
384 dictates.
385 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000386 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000387 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000388 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
389 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000390 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
391 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000392 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000393 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
394 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
395 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
396 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
397 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
398 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
399 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
400 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
401 without first creating a dialect class.
402 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
403 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
404 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000405 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000406 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
407 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000408 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
409 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
410 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
411 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000412 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
413 This has been fixed.
414
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000415- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
416 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
417 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
418 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
419
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000420- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
421
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000422- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
423 (Bug #951915).
424
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000425- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
426 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
427 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000428 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000429
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000430- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
431
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000432- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
433 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
434
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000435- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
436
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000437- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
438
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000439- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
440
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000441- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
442
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000443- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
444
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000445- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
446 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
447 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
448
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000449- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000450 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000451
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000452- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
453 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
454 tokenizer with very long source lines.
455
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000456- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
457 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
458
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000459- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
460 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000461
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000462- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
463 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
464
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000465- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
466 correctly.
467
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000468- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
469 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
470 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
471 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
472 between two lines.
473
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000474- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
475 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
476 handlers.
477
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000478- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000479 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
480 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000481
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000482- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
483 considering it exactly like a '*'.
484
485
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000486Build
487-----
488
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000489- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
490 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
491
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000492- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
493 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
494
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000495- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
496 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
497 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000498 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000499
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000500- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
501 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
502 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
503
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000504- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
505
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000506- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
507 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
508
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000509- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
510 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
511 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
512 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
513 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
514 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
515 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
516 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
517
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000518- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
519 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
520 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
521 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
522
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000523
524C API
525-----
526
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000527- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
528
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000529- Removed PyRange_New().
530
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000531
532Tests
533-----
534
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000535- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000536
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000537
538Documentation
539-------------
540
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000541- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
542
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000543- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
544
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000545- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
546
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000547- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
548
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000549- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
550
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000551- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
552
553- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
554
555- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
556
557- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
558
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000559- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
560 Closes bug #1166582.
561
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000562- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
563 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
564 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
565
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000566Mac
567---
568
569
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000570New platforms
571-------------
572
573- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
574
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000575
576Tools/Demos
577-----------
578
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000579- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
580 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
581 source files that need an encoding declaration.
582 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
583
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000584- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
585
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000586- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000587
588
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000589What's New in Python 2.4 final?
590===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000591
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000592*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000593
594Core and builtins
595-----------------
596
597- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
598 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
599 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
600
601
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000602What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
603==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000604
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000605*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000606
607Core and builtins
608-----------------
609
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000610- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
611 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
612 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
613
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000614
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000615Library
616-------
617
618- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
619 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
620 raised is re-raised.
621
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000622- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
623 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
624
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000625- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
626 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
627 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
628 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
629 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
630 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
631 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
632 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
633 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
634 by the slice are recomputed now.
635
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000636- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000637
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000638Build
639-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000640
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000641- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
642 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
643 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000644
645C API
646-----
647
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000648- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
649
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000650
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000651What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
652================================
653
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000654*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000655
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000656License
657-------
658
659The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
660is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
661changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
662Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
663intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
664durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
665the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
666License::
667
668 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
669
670says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
671to Python 2.1.1.
672
673The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
674License Version 2.
675
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000676Core and builtins
677-----------------
678
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000679- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
680 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
681 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
682 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
683 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
684 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
685 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
686 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
687 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
688 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
689
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000690- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000691
692Extension Modules
693-----------------
694
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000695- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
696 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
697 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
698 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000699
700Library
701-------
702
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000703- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
704 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
705 returned.
706
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000707- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
708
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000709- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
710 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
711
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000712- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
713
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000714- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
715 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000716
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000717- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
718
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000719- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
720
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000721- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000722 the source code is updated and reloaded.
723
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000724Build
725-----
726
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000727- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000728
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000729What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
730================================
731
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000732*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000733
734Core and builtins
735-----------------
736
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000737- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000738 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
739
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000740- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
741 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
742 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
743 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
744
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000745- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
746 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
747
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000748- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
749 constant.
750
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000751- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
752 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
753 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
754 large), and to anomalies such as
755 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
756 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
757 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
758 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000759
760Extension modules
761-----------------
762
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000763- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
764 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000765 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
766 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
767 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000768
769Library
770-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000771
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000772- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000773 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000774 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
775 --swig-cpp.
776
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000777- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
778 it is set.
779
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000780- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000781
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000782- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
783 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
784 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
785 Closes bug #1039270.
786
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000787- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000788
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000789 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000790 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
791 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
792 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
793 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
794 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
795 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
796 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
797 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
798 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
799 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
800 + Updates to documentation.
801
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000802- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
803 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
804 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
805 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
806
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000807- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000808
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000809- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
810 applications should use the getmember function.
811
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000812- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
813
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000814- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
815 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
816 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
817 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
818 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
819 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
820 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
821 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
822 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
823
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000824- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
825 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000826 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000827
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000828- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
829 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
830 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
831 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
832 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
833 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
834 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
835 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000836
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000837- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
838 the new public features (of which there are many).
839
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000840- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000841 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
842 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
843 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
844 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000845 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000846
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000847- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
848
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000849- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
850 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
851 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
852 options.
853
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000854- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
855 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
856 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
857 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
858 conditions under which non-string values work.
859
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000860Build
861-----
862
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000863- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
864 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
865 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
866
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000867- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
868 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
869 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
870 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
871 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000872
873C API
874-----
875
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000876- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
877 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
878
879- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
880
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000881- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
882 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
883 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
884 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
885 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
886 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
887 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
888 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
889 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
890
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000891- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
892
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000893- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
894 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
895 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000896
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000897Tests
898-----
899
900- test__locale ported to unittest
901
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000902Mac
903---
904
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000905- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
906 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
907 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000908
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000909Tools/Demos
910-----------
911
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000912- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
913 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
914 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
915 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
916 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000917
918
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000919What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
920=================================
921
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000922*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000923
924Core and builtins
925-----------------
926
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000927- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000928 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
929
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000930- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
931 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
932 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
933 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
934 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
935 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
936 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
937 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000938 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
939 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
940 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
941 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
942 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000943
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000944- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
945 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
946 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
947 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
948 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
949
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000950- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
951
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000952- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
953 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
954
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000955- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
956 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
957 modified the list.
958
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000959- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
960 functions is now writable.
961
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000962- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
963 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
964 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
965 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
966
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000967- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
968 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
969 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
970 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
971 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000972
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000973- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
974 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
975
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000976Extension modules
977-----------------
978
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000979- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
980
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000981- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
982 data.
983
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000984- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
985 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
986 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
987 supposed to have been truncated away.
988
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000989- Added socket.socketpair().
990
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000991- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
992 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
993
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000994- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000995 versions of Python, have now been removed.
996
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000997Library
998-------
999
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001000- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001001 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001002
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001003- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1004 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1005
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001006- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1007 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1008
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001009- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1010
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001011- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1012 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001013
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001014- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1015 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1016
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001017- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1018
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001019- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1020
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001021- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1022
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001023- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1024 Percivall.
1025
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001026- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1027 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1028
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001029- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1030 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1031 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001032 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001033
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001034- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1035 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1036 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1037 and exponent.
1038
1039- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1040
1041- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001042 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001043 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1044
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001045- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1046 to the readline module.
1047
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001048- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001049 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1050 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001051
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001052- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1053 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1054 contains symlinks.
1055
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001056- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1057 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1058
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001059- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1060 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1061 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1062
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001063- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1064 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1065 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1066 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1067 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1068 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1069 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1070 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1071 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1072 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1073 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1074 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1075 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1076
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001077- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1078
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001079Tools/Demos
1080-----------
1081
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001082- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1083 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1084
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001085- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1086
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001087Build
1088-----
1089
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001090- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1091 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1092 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1093 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1094 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1095 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1096 plans to do so.
1097
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001098- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1099 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1100
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001101- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1102 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1103
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001104- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1105 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1106
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001107- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1108 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1109
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001110- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1111 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1112
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001113C API
1114-----
1115
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001116..
1117
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001118Documentation
1119-------------
1120
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001121- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1122 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1123
1124- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1125 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1126 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001127
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001128New platforms
1129-------------
1130
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001131- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1132
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001133Tests
1134-----
1135
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001136..
1137
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001138Windows
1139-------
1140
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001141- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1142 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1143 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1144 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1145 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1146 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1147 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1148 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1149 the problem.
1150
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001151Mac
1152---
1153
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001154..
1155
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001156
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001157What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1158=================================
1159
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001160*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001161
1162Core and builtins
1163-----------------
1164
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001165- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1166 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1167 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1168 sensitive code.
1169
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001170- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001171 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001172
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001173 @staticmethod
1174 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001175
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001176 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001177
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001178- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1179 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1180 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1181 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1182 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1183 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1184 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1185 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1186 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1187 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1188 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1189
1190 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1191 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1192 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1193 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1194 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1195 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1196 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1197
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001198- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1199 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1200
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001201- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001202 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001203
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001204- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001205 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001206 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1207
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001208- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001209 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1210 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1211
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001212- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1213 types that support garbage collection.
1214
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001215- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1216
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001217- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1218 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1219 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1220 Jython.
1221
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001222- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1223
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001224- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1225 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1226
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001227- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1228 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1229 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001230
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001231- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1232 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1233 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1234
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001235Extension modules
1236-----------------
1237
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001238- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1239
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001240Library
1241-------
1242
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001243- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1244 TIS-620
1245
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001246- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1247 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1248 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1249 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1250 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1251 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1252 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1253 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1254 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1255 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1256
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001257- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1258
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001259- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1260 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1261 same as when the argument is omitted).
1262 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1263
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001264- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1265
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001266- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1267 schemes are offered.
1268
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001269- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1270
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001271- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1272 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1273 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1274
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001275- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1276
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001277- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1278 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1279
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001280- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1281 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1282 when dummy_threading is being used.
1283
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001284- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1285 from a tarfile.
1286
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001287- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001288 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001289
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001290- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1291 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1292 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1293 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1294
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001295- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1296 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1297
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001298- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1299 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1300 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1301 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1302 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1303 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1304 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1305 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1306 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1307 by some other method in progress).
1308
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001309- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1310 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1311 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001312
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001313- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1314
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001315- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1316 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1317 AM Kuchling.
1318
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001319- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1320 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1321 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1322
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001323- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1324 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1325 instead of unsigned.
1326
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001327- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001328 no longer part of the public API.
1329
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001330- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1331 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1332 string methods of the same name).
1333
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001334- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001335 SF patch 945642.
1336
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001337- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1338
1339 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1340
1341 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1342 DocTestSuites.
1343
1344- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1345 that provide thread-local data.
1346
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001347- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1348 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1349
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001350- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1351
1352- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1353 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1354 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1355
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001356- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1357
1358 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1359 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1360 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001361
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001362 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1363 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1364 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1365 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1366
1367 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1368 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1369
1370 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1371 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1372 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1373 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1374
1375 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1376 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1377 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1378 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1379 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1380
1381 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1382 wrapping help output.
1383
1384 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1385 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1386 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001387
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001388C API
1389-----
1390
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001391- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1392 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1393 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1394 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1395 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1396 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1397 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1398 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1399 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1400 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1401 its visible semantics have not changed.
1402
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001403- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1404 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1405
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001406Documentation
1407-------------
1408
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001409- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001410
1411 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001412 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001413
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001414 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001415
1416 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1417
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001418- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001419
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001420Tests
1421-----
1422
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001423- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001424 platforms that use the Makefile.
1425
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001426- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1427 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1428 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1429
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001430
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001431What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1432=================================
1433
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001434*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001435
1436Core and builtins
1437-----------------
1438
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001439- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1440 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1441 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1442 objects now (one object instead of three).
1443
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001444- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1445 Windows DLLs.
1446
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001447- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1448 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001449
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001450- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1451 a new .pyc magic.
1452
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001453- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1454 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1455 be there.
1456
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001457- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1458 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1459 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1460
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001461- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1462 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1463 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1464
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001465- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1466
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001467- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1468 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1469 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001470
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001471- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1472 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1473
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001474- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1475
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001476- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001477 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001478
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001479- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1480
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001481- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1482
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001483- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1484 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1485
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001486- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1487 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1488 Fixes bug #858016 .
1489
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001490- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1491 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1492 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1493
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001494- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1495 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1496 improves their performance (about 35%).
1497
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001498- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1499 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1500 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1501
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001502- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1503 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1504 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1505 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1506
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001507- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1508 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001509 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001510 length is not known).
1511
1512- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1513 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001514 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1515 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001516 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1517
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001518- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1519 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1520
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001521- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1522 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1523 keyword arguments.
1524
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001525- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1526 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1527 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1528
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001529- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1530 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1531 cases.
1532
1533- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1534 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1535 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1536 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1537 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1538 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1539 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1540 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1541 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1542 a release build.
1543
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001544- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1545 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1546
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001547- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001548 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001549
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001550- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1551 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1552 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1553 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1554 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1555 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1556 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1557 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1558 destroyed.
1559
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001560- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1561 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1562 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1563 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1564 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1565 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1566 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1567 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1568
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001569- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1570 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1571 character other than a space.
1572
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001573- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1574 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1575 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1576 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1577 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1578 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1579 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1580 attributes with the same name.
1581
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001582- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1583 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1584 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1585 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1586 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1587 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1588 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1589 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1590 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1591 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1592 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1593 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1594 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1595 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001596
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001597- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1598 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1599 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1600 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1601 This has been repaired.
1602
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001603- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1604
1605- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1606
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001607- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1608 over a sequence.
1609
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001610- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001611 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001612
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001613- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1614
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001615- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1616 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1617 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1618 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1619 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1620 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1621 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1622 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1623
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001624- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1625 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1626 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1627
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001628- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1629 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1630 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1631 freelist.
1632
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001633- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1634 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1635
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001636- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1637 number.
1638
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001639- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1640 a TypeError exception.
1641
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001642- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1643 820195.
1644
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001645- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1646 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1647 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1648
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001649- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001650 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1651 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001652
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001653- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1654 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1655 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1656
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001657- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1658 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001659 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001660
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001661- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001662 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1663 the first call.
1664
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001665
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001666Extension modules
1667-----------------
1668
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001669- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1670 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1671
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001672- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1673 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1674 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1675 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1676 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1677 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1678 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001679
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001680- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1681
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001682- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1683
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001684- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1685 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1686
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001687- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1688 fewer false positives.
1689
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001690- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1691 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1692
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001693- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001694 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1695
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001696- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001697 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001698 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001699 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1700 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001701
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001702- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1703 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1704 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1705 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1706
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001707- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1708 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1709 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1710 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1711 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1712 #897625.
1713
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001714- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1715 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1716
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001717- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1718 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1719 and pops on either side of the deque.
1720
1721- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1722 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1723
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001724- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1725 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1726 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1727 other functions that expect a function argument.
1728
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001729- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1730
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001731- os.getsid was added.
1732
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001733- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1734 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1735 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1736
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001737- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1738
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001739- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1740
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001741- readline.clear_history was added.
1742
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001743- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1744
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001745- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1746
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001747- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1748
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001749- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1750
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001751- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1752
1753- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1754
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001755- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1756
1757- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1758
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001759- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1760 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1761 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1762
1763- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1764 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1765 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1766 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1767 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1768 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1769 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1770
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001771- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1772 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1773 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1774 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001775
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001776- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001777 iterators from a single iterable.
1778
1779- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1780 of raising a TypeError exception.
1781
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001782- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1783 as parameter.
1784
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001785Library
1786-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001787
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001788- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1789
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001790- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1791 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1792 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001793
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001794- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1795 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1796 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001797
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001798- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001799
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001800- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1801 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001802
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001803- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1804 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1805
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001806- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1807
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001808- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001809 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001810
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001811- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001812 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001813
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001814- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1815
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001816- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1817 on cygwin and mingw32.
1818
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001819- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1820
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001821- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1822 module.
1823
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001824- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1825 installation scheme for all platforms.
1826
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001827- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001828 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001829
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001830- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1831 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1832 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1833
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001834- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1835 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1836 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1837
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001838- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1839
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001840- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1841
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001842- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1843 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1844
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001845- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1846 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1847 type pattern with the same value exists.
1848
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001849- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1850 when run from the command prompt).
1851
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001852- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1853 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1854
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001855- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1856 default sort).
1857
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001858- Added global runctx function to profile module
1859
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001860- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1861
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001862- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1863
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001864- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1865
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001866- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001867 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1868 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1869 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1870 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1871 accordingly.
1872
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001873- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1874 decoding standards.
1875
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001876- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1877 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1878 called for all requests.
1879
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001880- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1881 they are passed to the compiler.
1882
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001883- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1884 indent, width and depth.
1885
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001886- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1887 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1888
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001889- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1890 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1891
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001892- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1893
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001894- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1895
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001896- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1897
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001898- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1899 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1900
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001901- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001902 for better performance.
1903
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001904- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001905
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001906- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1907 a string).
1908
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001909- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1910
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001911- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1912
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001913- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1914
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001915- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1916
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001917- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1918 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1919 list of fieldnames.
1920
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001921- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1922 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1923
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001924- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1925
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001926- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1927 empty lists.
1928
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001929- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1930 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1931 and shelves.
1932
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001933- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1934 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1935
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001936- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001937 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1938 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001939
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001940- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1941 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001942 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001943
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001944- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001945 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1946 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1947
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001948- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1949 and removed in Py2.4.
1950
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001951- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1952
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001953- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1954
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001955Tools/Demos
1956-----------
1957
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001958- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1959 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1960
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001961- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1962
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001963- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1964 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1965 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1966 destination in situations where both files are given.
1967
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001968- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1969 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1970 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1971 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1972
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001973- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1974
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001975- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1976 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1977 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1978 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1979 now.
1980
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001981- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1982 in effect
1983
1984- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1985 C-c C-h
1986
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001987- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1988 -d option was given.
1989
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001990Build
1991-----
1992
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001993- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1994 build under OS X.
1995
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001996- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1997 --enable-profiling.
1998
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001999- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2000 is configured --with-tsc.
2001
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002002- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2003 on AMD64.
2004
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002005- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2006 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2007
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002008- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2009 removed.
2010
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002011- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2012 supported (see PEP 11).
2013
2014- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2015
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002016- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2017
2018- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2019 (see PEP 11).
2020
2021- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2022 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2023
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002024C API
2025-----
2026
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002027- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2028 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2029 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2030
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002031- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2032 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2033 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2034 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2035
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002036- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2037 generator objects.
2038
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002039- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2040 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002041 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2042 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002043
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002044- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2045 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2046
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002047- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2048 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2049 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2050 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2051 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2052
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002053- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2054 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2055 about 10% faster.
2056
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002057- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2058 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2059
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002060- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2061 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2062 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2063 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2064
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002065Windows
2066-------
2067
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002068- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2069 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2070 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2071 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2072
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002073- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2074 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2075 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2076
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002077
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002078What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2079===============================
2080
2081*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2082
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002083IDLE
2084----
2085
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002086- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2087 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2088 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2089 context-menu actions.
2090
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002091- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2092 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2093 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2094 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2095 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2096 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2097 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2098 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2099 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2100
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002101
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002102What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2103=============================================
2104
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002105*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002106
2107Core and builtins
2108-----------------
2109
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002110- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002111 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002112 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2113
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002114Extension modules
2115-----------------
2116
2117- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2118 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2119 than once. This has been fixed.
2120
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002121- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2122 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2123 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2124 call.
2125
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002126- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2127
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002128Library
2129-------
2130
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002131- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2132 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2133
2134- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2135 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2136 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2137 restored.
2138
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002139IDLE
2140----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002141
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002142- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002143
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002144Build
2145-----
2146
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002147- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2148 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2149
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002150C API
2151-----
2152
2153Windows
2154-------
2155
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002156- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2157 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2158
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002159- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2160
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002161Mac
2162---
2163
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002164- Various fixes to pimp.
2165
2166- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2167
2168- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2169 more problems than it solves.
2170
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002171
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002172What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2173=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002174
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002175*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2176
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002177Core and builtins
2178-----------------
2179
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002180- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2181 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2182
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002183- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2184 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002185 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002186
2187- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2188 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2189 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002190 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002191
2192- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2193 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002194
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002195- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2196 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2197 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2198
2199- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002200 770247.
2201
2202- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002203
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002204Extension modules
2205-----------------
2206
2207- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2208 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2209
2210- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2211
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002212- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2213
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002214- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2215 contained within the _strptime module.
2216
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002217- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2218 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2219
2220- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002221 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2222
2223- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2224 the find_class attribute, if present.
2225
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002226- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002227
2228 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2229 (SF bug 763298).
2230
2231 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002232 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2233 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2234 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002235
2236 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2237
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002238Library
2239-------
2240
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002241- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2242
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002243- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2244 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2245 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2246 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2247 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2248 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2249 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2250 or Tester().
2251
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002252- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2253 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2254 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2255 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2256 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2257 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2258 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2259 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2260 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002261
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002262 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002263
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002264- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2265 weren't before was an oversight.
2266
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002267- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2268 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2269
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002270- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2271 when there are no lines.
2272
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002273- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2274 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2275
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002276- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2277 to child processes.
2278
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002279- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2280
2281- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2282
2283- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2284 xmlrpclib.
2285
2286- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2287 responses.
2288
2289- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2290 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2291
2292- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2293 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2294 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2295
2296- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2297 used as patterns.
2298
2299- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2300 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2301 than Tk 8.3.
2302
2303- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2304
2305- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002306
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002307Tools/Demos
2308-----------
2309
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002310- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2311
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002312- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2313
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002314- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002315
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002316Build
2317-----
2318
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002319- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2320
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002321- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2322
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002323- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2324 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002325
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002326- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2327 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2328 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002329
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002330C API
2331-----
2332
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002333- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2334 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2335
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002336Windows
2337-------
2338
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002339- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2340 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2341 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2342 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2343 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2344 Python exception ::
2345
2346 thread.error: can't start new thread
2347
2348 is raised now.
2349
2350- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2351 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2352 instead of from DLL teardown.
2353
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002354Mac
2355---
2356
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002357- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002358 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002359 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2360 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2361 the executable in the bundle.
2362
2363- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002364
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002365- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2366
2367- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2368 on Panther.
2369
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002370What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2371================================
2372
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002373*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002374
2375Core and builtins
2376-----------------
2377
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002378- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2379 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2380 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2381 with the -i option.
2382
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002383- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2384 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2385
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002386- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2387 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2388
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002389- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2390 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2391 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2392 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2393 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2394 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2395 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2396 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2397 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2398 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2399 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2400 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2401 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002402
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002403- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2404 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2405 embedded in a lambda expression.
2406
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002407- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2408 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2409 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2410 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2411 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2412
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002413- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2414 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2415 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2416
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002417- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2418 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2419
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002420- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2421 It's writable again.
2422
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002423- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2424 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2425 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002426 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002427
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002428- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2429 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2430 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2431
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002432Extension modules
2433-----------------
2434
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002435- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2436 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2437
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002438- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2439 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2440 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2441 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2442
2443- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2444 collection.
2445
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002446- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2447 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2448 unique within a single program run.
2449
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002450- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2451 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2452
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002453- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2454 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2455
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002456- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2457 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002458
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002459- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2460
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002461- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2462 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2463
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002464- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2465 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2466 for many BSD-derived systems.
2467
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002468
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002469Library
2470-------
2471
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002472- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2473 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2474 primary ones:
2475
2476 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2477 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2478 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2479
2480 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2481 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2482 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2483 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2484 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2485 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2486
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002487- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2488 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2489 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2490 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2491 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2492 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2493 argument.
2494
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002495- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2496 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2497 in the archive.
2498
2499- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2500 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2501
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002502- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2503 569574).
2504
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002505- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2506 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2507 no more.
2508
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002509- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2510 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2511 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2512 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2513 code coverage.
2514
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002515- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2516 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2517 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002518 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2519 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002520
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002521- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2522 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2523 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002524 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002525
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002526- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2527
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002528- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2529 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2530 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2531 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2532
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002533- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2534 handling.
2535
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002536- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2537 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2538
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002539- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2540 in socket.py.
2541
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002542- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2543
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002544- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2545 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2546 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2547 opener with proxy support.
2548
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002549- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2550
2551- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2552
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002553Tools/Demos
2554-----------
2555
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002556- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2557
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002558- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2559
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002560- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2561 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002562
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002563- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2564 files.
2565
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002566Build
2567-----
2568
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002569- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002570 different root directory.
2571
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002572C API
2573-----
2574
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002575- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2576 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2577 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2578 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2579 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2580 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2581 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2582 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2583 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2584 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2585
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002586- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2587 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2588 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2589 from Python.
2590
2591
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002592New platforms
2593-------------
2594
2595None this time.
2596
2597Tests
2598-----
2599
2600- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2601 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2602
2603Windows
2604-------
2605
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002606- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2607
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002608- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2609 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2610 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2611 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2612 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2613 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2614 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2615 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2616 that's what it's for.
2617
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002618Mac
2619---
2620
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002621- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2622 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2623 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2624 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002625- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2626 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2627- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002628
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002629SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2630------------------------------------
2631
2632430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2633598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2634622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2635661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2636683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2637697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2638713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2639724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2640727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2641729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2642730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2643731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2644732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2645733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2646735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2647740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2648744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2649745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2650747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2651749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2652751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2653753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2654755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2655757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2656760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2657
2658
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002659What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2660================================
2661
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002662*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002663
2664Core and builtins
2665-----------------
2666
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002667- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2668 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2669
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002670- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2671 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2672 and cannot be strings).
2673
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002674- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2675 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2676 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2677 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2678
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002679- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2680 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2681 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2682 Python itself.
2683
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002684- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2685 the referenced object, if it has one.
2686
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002687- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2688 the thread started at
2689 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2690
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002691- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2692 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2693 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2694 placed on a list index.
2695
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002696- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2697 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2698 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2699 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2700
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002701- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2702 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2703 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2704 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2705 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2706 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2707 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2708
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002709- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2710 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2711 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2712 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2713 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2714
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002715- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2716 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002717
2718- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2719 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2720 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2721 #693195.)
2722
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002723- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2724 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002725
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002726- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002727 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002728 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2729 interpreter executions, would fail.
2730
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002731- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002732 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002733 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002734
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002735Extension modules
2736-----------------
2737
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002738- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2739 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2740 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2741 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2742
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002743- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2744 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2745
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002746- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2747 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2748 and Greg Chapman.)
2749
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002750- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2751 recursively.
2752
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002753- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002754 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2755 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2756 leaks.
2757
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002758- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2759
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002760- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2761 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2762 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2763 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2764 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2765 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2766 #705836.
2767
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002768- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002769 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2770
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002771- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2772 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2773 See SF bug #692416.
2774
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002775- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2776 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2777
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002778- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2779 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2780 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002781
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002782- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002783 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2784 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2785
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002786- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2787 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2788 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2789 timeouts to work properly.
2790
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002791Library
2792-------
2793
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002794- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2795 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2796 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2797 future release.
2798
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002799- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2800 for querying platform dependent features.
2801
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002802- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002803
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002804- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2805 pickle protocol versions.
2806
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002807- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2808 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2809 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2810
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002811- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2812
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002813- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2814 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2815 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2816 modules.
2817
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002818- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2819 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2820 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2821
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002822- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2823 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2824
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002825- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2826 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2827 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2828
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002829- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002830 MS Office extensions.
2831
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002832- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2833 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2834
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002835- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2836 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2837
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002838- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2839 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2840 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2841 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2842 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2843 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2844
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002845- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2846 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2847 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002848
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002849- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2850 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2851 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2852
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002853- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2854
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002855- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2856 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2857 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2858
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002859Tools/Demos
2860-----------
2861
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002862- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2863 See the module docstring for details.
2864
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002865Build
2866-----
2867
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002868- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2869 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002870
2871C API
2872-----
2873
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002874- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2875
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002876- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2877 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2878 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2879
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002880- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2881 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002882
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002883 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2884 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2885 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002886
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002887- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002888 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2889
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002890- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2891 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2892 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002893
2894New platforms
2895-------------
2896
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002897None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002898
2899Tests
2900-----
2901
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002902- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2903 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002904
2905Windows
2906-------
2907
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002908- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2909 function.
2910
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002911- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2912 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002913
2914Mac
2915---
2916
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002917- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2918 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002919
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002920- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2921 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002922
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002923- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2924 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2925 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002926
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002927- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002928 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2929 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002930
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002931- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2932 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002933
2934
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002935What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2936=================================
2937
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002938*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002939
2940Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002941-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002942
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002943- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2944 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2945 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2946
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002947- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2948 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2949 (SF patch #664376.)
2950
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002951- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2952 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2953 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2954 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2955 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2956 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002957 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002958
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002959- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2960 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2961 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2962 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002963 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002964
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002965- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2966 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2967 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2968 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2969 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2970 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2971 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2972 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2973 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2974 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2975 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2976
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002977- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2978 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2979 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2980 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2981 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2982 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2983
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002984- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2985 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2986
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002987- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2988 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2989 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2990 case.)
2991
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002992- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2993 passed as unicode strings.
2994
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002995- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2996 See SF bug #683467.
2997
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002998- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2999 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3000
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003001- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3002
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003003- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3004
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003005- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3006 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3007 arguments.
3008
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003009- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3010 See SF bug #667147.
3011
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003012- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003013 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003014 See SF bug #676155.
3015
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003016- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003017 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003018 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3019 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3020 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3021 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3022 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3023 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003024
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003025Extension modules
3026-----------------
3027
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003028- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3029 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3030 tp_as_number pointer.
3031
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003032- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3033 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3034 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3035 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3036 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3037
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003038- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3039
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003040- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3041
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003042- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003043 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003044 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3045 patch #678531.)
3046
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003047- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3048 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3049
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003050- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3051 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3052
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003053- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3054
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003055- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3056 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3057 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3058
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003059- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3060
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003061- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3062 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3063
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003064- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003065
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003066- datetime changes:
3067
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003068 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3069
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003070 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3071 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3072 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3073 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3074 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3075 now.
3076
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003077 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003078 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3079 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003080
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003081 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003082 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003083 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3084 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3085 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3086 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003087
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003088 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3089 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3090 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003091 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3092
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003093 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3094 by a later example coded by Guido.
3095
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003096 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003097 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3098 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3099 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003100 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3101 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3102
3103 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3104 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3105 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3106 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3107 tzinfo subclass instance.
3108
3109 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3110 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3111 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3112 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3113 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3114 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3115 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3116 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003117
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003118 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3119 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3120 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3121 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3122 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003123 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3124
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003125 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003126
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003127 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3128 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3129 as a naive datetime object.
3130
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003131 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3132 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3133 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3134
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003135 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3136 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3137 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3138 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3139 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3140 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3141 comparison.
3142
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003143 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3144 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3145 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3146 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003147 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003148
3149 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003150
3151 and ::
3152
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003153 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3154
3155 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3156 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3157 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3158 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3159
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003160 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3161 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3162 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3163 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3164 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3165
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003166 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3167 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003168 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3169 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003170
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003171Library
3172-------
3173
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003174- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3175 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3176
3177- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3178 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3179 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3180 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3181 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3182 See PEP 307 for details.
3183
3184- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3185 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3186
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003187- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3188 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003189 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003190 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3191 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003192 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003193
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003194- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3195 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3196
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003197- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3198 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3199 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3200
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003201- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3202
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003203- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3204 exception.
3205
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003206- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3207 class.
3208
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003209- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3210 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3211 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3212
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003213- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3214 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3215
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003216- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003217 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3218 See SF bug #659228.
3219
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003220- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3221 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3222 See SF patch #651082.
3223
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003224- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003225
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003226- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3227 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3228
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003229- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003230 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003231
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003232- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3233 DOS paths from other platforms.
3234
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003235Tools/Demos
3236-----------
3237
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003238- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3239 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3240 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3241 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3242 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3243 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3244 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3245 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3246 example:
3247
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003248 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3249 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003250
3251 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3252
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003253
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003254Build
3255-----
3256
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003257- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3258 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3259 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003260 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3261
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003262 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3263
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003264- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3265 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3266 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3267 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3268 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3269 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3270 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3271 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3272 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3273
3274- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3275 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3276 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3277 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3278
3279- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3280 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3281
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003282C API
3283-----
3284
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003285- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3286 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003287
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003288- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3289 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3290 tp_as_number pointer.
3291
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003292- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3293 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3294 (SF #681367)
3295
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003296- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3297 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3298 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3299 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003300
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003301Tests
3302-----
3303
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003304- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003305 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3306 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3307 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3308 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3309 pydoc.)
3310
3311- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3312
3313- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003314
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003315Windows
3316-------
3317
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003318- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3319 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3320 time).
3321
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003322- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3323 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3324
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003325- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3326 release without strong cryptography.
3327
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003328- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003329 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003330
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003331- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3332 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3333
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003334Mac
3335---
3336
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003337- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3338 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003339
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003340- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3341 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3342 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003343
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003344- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3345 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003346
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003347- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3348 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3349 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3350 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003351
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003352- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003353 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3354 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3355 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003356
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003357
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003358What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003359=================================
3360
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003361*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003362
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003363Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003364--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003365
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003366- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3367
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003368- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3369 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003370 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003371 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003372 a different meaning than before.
3373
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003374- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003375 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003376 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003377
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003378- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003379 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003380 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003381
3382- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3383 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3384 and deallocation.
3385
3386- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3387 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3388
3389- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3390 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3391 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3392 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3393 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3394
3395- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3396 now detected by the garbage collector.
3397
3398- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3399 [SF bug 519621]
3400
3401- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3402 identifier.
3403
3404- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3405 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3406 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3407 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3408 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3409 [SF bug 563060]
3410
3411- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3412 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3413 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3414 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3415 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3416
3417- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3418 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3419 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3420
3421- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3422
3423- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3424 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3425 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3426 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3427 state of the slots would be lost.)
3428
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003429Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003430-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003431
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003432- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003433 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3434 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3435 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3436 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003437 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3438 Jython 2.1.
3439
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003440- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003441 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003442 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3443 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3444 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3445 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3446 these, see PEP 302.
3447
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003448- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3449 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3450 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3451
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003452- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3453 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3454 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3455
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003456- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3457 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3458 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3459
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003460- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3461 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3462 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3463 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3464 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3465 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3466 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3467 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3468 releases or implementations.
3469
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003470- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003471 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3472 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003473
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003474- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3475 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3476
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003477- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3478 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3479 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3480
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003481- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3482 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3483
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003484- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3485 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003486 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3487 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003488
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003489- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3490 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3491 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3492 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3493 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3494
3495 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3496 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3497 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3498 pattern.
3499
3500 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3501 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3502 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3503 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3504
3505 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3506 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3507 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3508 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3509 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3510 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3511
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003512- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3513 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3514 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3515 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3516 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3517 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3518 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3519 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003520
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003521- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3522 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3523 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3524 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3525 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003526 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3527 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3528 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3529 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3530 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3531 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3532 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003533
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003534- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3535 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3536
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003537- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3538 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3539 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3540 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3541 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3542 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3543 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3544 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3545 to Zack Weinberg!
3546
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003547- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3548 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3549 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3550 type. This has been fixed now.
3551
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003552- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3553 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3554 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3555
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003556- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3557 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3558 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3559 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3560 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3561 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3562 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3563 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003564 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003565
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003566- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3567 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3568 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003569
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003570- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3571 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3572 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3573 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3574 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3575 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3576 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3577 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003578 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003579 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3580 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3581
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003582- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3583 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3584 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3585 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3586 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3587 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3588 this.)
3589
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003590- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3591 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003592 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003593 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003594 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3595 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003596 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3597 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003598
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003599- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3600 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3601 currently running.
3602
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003603- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3604 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3605 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3606 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3607
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003608- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3609 as directory names.
3610
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003611- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3612 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3613
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003614- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3615 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3616
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003617- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003618 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3619 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003620
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003621- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3622 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3623 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3624 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3625 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3626
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003627- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3628 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3629 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3630 removed.
3631
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003632- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3633 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3634 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3635
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003636- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3637 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3638 to __debug__.
3639
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003640- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3641 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3642 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3643
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003644- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3645 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3646 deprecated now.
3647
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003648- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3649 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3650 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003651
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003652- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3653 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3654 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3655 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3656 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003657
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003658- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3659 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3660
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003661- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3662 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3663 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003664 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003665 is backward compatible.
3666
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003667- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3668 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3669 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3670 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3671 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3672
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003673- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3674 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3675 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3676 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3677 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3678 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003679
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003680- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3681 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3682
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003683- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3684 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3685
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003686- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3687 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3688 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3689 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3690 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3691
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003692- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3693 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3694 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3695
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003696- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003697 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3698
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003699- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3700 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3701 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003702
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003703- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3704 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3705
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003706- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3707 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3708 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3709
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003710- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3711
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003712Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003713-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003714
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003715- Added three operators to the operator module:
3716 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3717 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3718 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3719
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003720- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3721
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003722- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3723 archives.
3724
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003725- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3726 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3727 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3728
3729 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3730
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003731- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3732 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3733 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003734 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003735
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003736- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3737 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3738 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3739 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003740 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3741 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3742 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3743 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003744
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003745- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3746 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003747
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003748- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3749
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003750- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3751 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3752
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003753- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3754 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3755 supported.
3756
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003757- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3758
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003759- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3760 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003761
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003762- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3763 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3764
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003765- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3766
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003767- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3768 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3769
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003770- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3771 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3772 functions but callable type objects.
3773
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003774- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003775 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003776 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003777
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003778- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3779 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003780
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003781- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3782 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003783
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003784- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3785 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3786 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3787 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3788
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003789- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3790 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003791
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003792- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3793 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3794 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3795 and __imul__.
3796
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003797- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003798 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3799 is called.
3800
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003801- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3802 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3803 interpreter was compiled.
3804
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003805- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3806 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3807 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003808 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003809 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3810 1, not 2.
3811
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003812- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3813 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3814 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3815 limit.
3816
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003817- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3818 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3819 bug #623464.
3820
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003821- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3822 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3823 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3824 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3825
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003826Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003827-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003828
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003829- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3830
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003831- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3832 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3833 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3834 with Python 2.3a2.
3835
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003836- os.path exposes getctime.
3837
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003838- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003839 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003840 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003841 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003842 unit tests of floating point results.
3843
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003844- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3845 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3846 has been increased.
3847
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003848- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3849 executed.
3850
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003851- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3852 postinstallation script.
3853
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003854- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3855 test the current module.
3856
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003857- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003858 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3859 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3860 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3861 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3862
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003863- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003864 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003865 Ward's Optik package.
3866
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003867- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3868 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3869 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3870 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3871
3872- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3873 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003874 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003875
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003876- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3877 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3878 shelf are binary pickles.
3879
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003880- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3881 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3882
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003883- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3884 modules are iterators now.
3885
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003886- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3887 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3888 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3889 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3890 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3891 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003892
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003893- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3894 with their entity value.
3895
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003896- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3897
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003898- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3899 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003900
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003901- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3902 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003903 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003904
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003905- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3906 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3907 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3908 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3909 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3910 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3911 main():
3912
3913 import locale
3914 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3915
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003916- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3917 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3918
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003919- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3920 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3921 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3922 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3923 to the new standard.
3924
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003925- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3926 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3927 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3928 an extension to the database.
3929
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003930- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3931 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3932 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3933 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003934 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003935
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003936- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003937 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003938
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003939- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3940 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3941 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3942 bounded integers.
3943
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003944- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3945 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3946 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3947 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3948 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3949 in existence.
3950
3951 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3952 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3953 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3954 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3955 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3956 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3957
3958 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3959 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3960 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3961 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3962
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003963- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3964 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3965 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3966
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003967- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3968
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003969- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3970 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3971 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3972 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3973
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003974- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3975 argument.
3976
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003977- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3978 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3979 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3980 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3981 [SF patch 560794].
3982
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003983- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3984 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3985 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003986 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3987 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3988 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003989
3990- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3991 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003992
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003993- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3994 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3995 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3996 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003997
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003998- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3999 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4000 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4001 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4002 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4003
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004004- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004005
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004006- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4007
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004008- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4009 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4010 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4011 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4012 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4013 identical to None.
4014
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004015- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4016 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4017 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4018 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4019 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4020 results now.
4021
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004022- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4023 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4024
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004025- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4026 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4027 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4028 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4029 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4030 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4031 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4032 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4033
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004034- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4035
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004036- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4037 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4038
4039- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4040 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4041 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4042 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4043 and other systems.
4044
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004045- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4046 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4047 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4048 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 +00004049 work well with these.
4050
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004051- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4052
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004053- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004054 connections.
4055
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004056- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4057 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4058 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4059
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004060- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4061 sets
4062
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004063- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4064 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4065 name.
4066
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004067- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4068 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4069 passed in.
4070
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004071- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004072 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004073 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4074 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004075
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004076- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4077
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004078- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4079
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004080- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4081 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4082 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4083
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004084- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4085 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4086 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4087 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004088 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004089
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004090- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004091 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004092 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004093
4094- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4095 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4096 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4097
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004098- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004099 the value of its expression argument.
4100
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004101- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4102 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4103 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4104
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004105- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4106 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4107 skipstone browser was included.
4108
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004109- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4110 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4111
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004112Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004113-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004114
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004115- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4116 names in addition to accepting file names.
4117
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004118- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4119 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4120 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4121 still used and useful.)
4122
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004123- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4124 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4125 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4126 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004127
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004128- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4129 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4130 the generated binary.
4131
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004132Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004133-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004134
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004135- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4136
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004137- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4138 except in the hands of experts.
4139
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004140- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004141 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4142 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4143 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004144
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004145- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4146 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4147 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4148 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4149 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4150 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4151 builds.
4152
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004153- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4154 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4155 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4156 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4157 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4158 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4159 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4160 new type.
4161
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004162- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004163
4164 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4165 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4166 positive infinities.
4167
4168 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4169 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4170 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4171 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4172 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4173 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4174 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4175
4176 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4177
4178 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4179
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004180- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4181 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4182 size of the executable.
4183
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004184- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4185 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4186 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4187 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004188
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004189- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4190
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004191- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4192 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4193 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004194
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004195- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4196 well as Unix.
4197
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004198- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4199 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4200 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4201 modules in the README file for details.
4202
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004203C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004204-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004205
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004206- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4207 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004208 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004209 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004210 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004211
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004212- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4213 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4214 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4215 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4216 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4217 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004218 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004219 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4220 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4221 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4222 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4223 aligned.)
4224
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004225- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4226 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4227 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4228
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004229- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4230 level.
4231
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004232- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4233 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4234 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4235 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4236 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4237
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004238- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4239 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4240 code.
4241
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004242- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4243 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4244 adjusting for negative indices.
4245
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004246- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4247 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4248 object.
4249
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004250- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4251 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4252 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4253
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004254- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4255 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004256
4257- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4258
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004259- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4260 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4261 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4262 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4263
4264- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4265
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004266- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004267
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004268- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004269 without going through the buffer API.
4270
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004271- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004272
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004273- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4274 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4275 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4276 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4277
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004278- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4279 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4280
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004281- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004282 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4283
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004284New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004285-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004286
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004287- OpenVMS is now supported.
4288
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004289- AtheOS is now supported.
4290
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004291- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4292
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004293- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4294
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004295Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004296-----
4297
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004298- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4299 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4300 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004301
4302Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004303-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004304
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004305- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4306 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4307 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4308 bugs.
4309 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004310 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004311 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4312 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004313 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004314
4315- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004316 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004317
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004318- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4319 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4320
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004321- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4322 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004323 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004324 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4325
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004326- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4327 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4328 use files" uninstall option).
4329
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004330- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4331
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004332- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4333 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4334
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004335- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4336 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4337 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4338
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004339- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4340 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4341 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4342 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4343 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004344 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4345 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4346 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004347
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004348- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004349 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004350 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4351 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4352 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4353 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4354 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4355 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4356 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4357 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4358 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4359 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4360 work around.
4361
4362- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4363 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4364 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4365 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4366 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4367 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4368 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4369 specified with O_CREAT too).
4370
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004371Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004372----
4373
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004374- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004375
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004376- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4377 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4378 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4379
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004380- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4381 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4382 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4383
4384- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4385 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4386 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4387 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4388 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4389 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4390 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4391 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004392
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004393- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4394 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4395 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004396
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004397- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4398 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4399 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4400 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4401 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004402
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004403- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4404 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4405 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004406
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004407- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4408 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004409
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004410- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4411 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4412 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4413 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4414 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004415
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004416- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4417 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4418 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4419
4420- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4421 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4422 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004423
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004424- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4425 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4426 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4427 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004428 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004429
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004430- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4431 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004432
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004433- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4434 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004435
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004436- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004437 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004438 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4439 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004440
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004441
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004442What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004443===============================
4444
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004445*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4446
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004447Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004448--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004449
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004450- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4451 with a custom metaclass.
4452
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004453Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004454-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004455
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004456- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4457 are proxies.
4458
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004459Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004460-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004461
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004462- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4463 very short strings.
4464
4465- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4466 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4467 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4468 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4469 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4470
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004471Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004472-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004473
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004474- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4475 close or delete time).
4476
4477- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4478 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4479
4480- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4481
4482- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004483 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004484
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004485Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004486-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004487
4488Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004489-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004490
4491C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004492-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004493
4494New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004495-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004496
4497Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004498-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004499
4500Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004501-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004502
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004503- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4504
4505- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4506 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4507
4508- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4509 deleted at process exit time.
4510
4511- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4512 in backslash.
4513
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004514Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004515----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004516
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004517- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4518 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4519 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4520
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004521
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004522What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004523===========================
4524
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004525*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4526
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004527Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004528--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004529
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004530- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4531 been extensively updated. See
4532
4533 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4534
4535 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4536
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004537- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4538 deleted!
4539
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004540- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4541 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4542 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4543 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4544 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4545
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004546- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4547
4548 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4549 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4550
4551 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4552 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4553 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4554 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4555 supported anyway.
4556
4557 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4558 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4559
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004560- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4561 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4562 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4563 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4564 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004565
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004566- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4567 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4568 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4569
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004570Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004571-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004572
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004573- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4574 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4575 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4576 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4577 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4578 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004579 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4580 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4581 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4582 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004583
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004584- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4585 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4586 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4587
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004588Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004589-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004590
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004591- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4592
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004593Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004594-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004595
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004596- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4597 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4598 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4599 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4600 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4601 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4602
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004603- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4604
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004605- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4606
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004607- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4608
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004609- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4610 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4611 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4612
4613- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4614
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004615Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004616-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004617
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004618- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4619 off a search on Google.
4620
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004621Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004622-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004623
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004624- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4625 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4626 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4627 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4628 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4629 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4630 other platforms should do likewise.
4631
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004632- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4633 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4634 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4635
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004636C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004637-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004638
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004639- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4640 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4641 producing key-value pairs.
4642
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004643- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004644 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004645 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4646 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4647 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4648 previously went unchallenged.
4649
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004650New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004651-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004652
4653Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004654-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004655
4656Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004657-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004658
4659Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004660----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004661
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004662- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4663 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004664
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004665- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4666 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4667 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4668 home.
4669
4670
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004671What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004672===========================
4673
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004674*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4675
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004676Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004677--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004678
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004679- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4680 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004681
4682 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004683 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004684
4685 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4686 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004687 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004688 This needs to be documented.
4689
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004690- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4691 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4692
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004693- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4694 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4695 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4696
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004697- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4698 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4699
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004700- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4701 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4702 class forbids it).
4703
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004704- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4705 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4706 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4707
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004708- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4709
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004710Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004711-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004712
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004713- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4714 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004715 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004716
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004717- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4718 (like 1 + '').
4719
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004720Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004721-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004722
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004723- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4724 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4725 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4726 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004727 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004728 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4729
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004730- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4731 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4732 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4733 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4734
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004735- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4736 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004737 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4738 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4739 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004740
4741- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4742 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004743
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004744- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4745 bytes on its input.
4746
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004747Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004748-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004749
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004750- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004751 convenience function.
4752
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004753- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4754 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4755 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004756 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4757 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4758 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4759 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4760 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4761 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004762
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004763- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4764 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4765 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4766 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4767
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004768- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4769 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4770 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4771
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004772- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4773 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4774 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4775 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4776
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004777- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4778 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004779 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004780 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4781 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4782 new -l and -e options.
4783
4784- statcache is now deprecated.
4785
4786- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4787 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004788 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004789 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4790 time properly taken into account.
4791
4792- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4793 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4794 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4795 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4796
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004797Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004798-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004799
4800Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004801-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004802
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004803- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4804 is built with libdb3 if available.
4805
4806- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4807
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004808C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004809-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004810
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004811- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4812 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4813 PySequence_Size().
4814
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004815- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4816
4817- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4818 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4819 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4820
4821- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4822 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4823
4824- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4825 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4826
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004827New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004828-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004829
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004830- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4831 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4832
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004833- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4834 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4835
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004836- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4837
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004838Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004839-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004840
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004841- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4842 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4843
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004844Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004845-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004846
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004847Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004848----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004849
4850- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4851 removed completely in the next release.
4852
4853- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4854 OSX.
4855
4856- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4857 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4858
4859- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4860
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004861
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004862What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004863===========================
4864
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004865*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4866
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004867Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004868--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004869
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004870- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004871 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004872 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004873 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4874 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004875 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4876 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004877 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4878 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004879
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004880- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4881 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4882
4883- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4884 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4885
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004886Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004887-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004888
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004889- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4890 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4891 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4892 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4893 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4894 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4895 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4896 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4897
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004898- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4899 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4900 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4901 example).
4902
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004903- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004904 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004905 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004906 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004907
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004908- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4909 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4910 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004911 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004912
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004913- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4914 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4915 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4916 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4917 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4918 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4919
4920 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4921
4922 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4923
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004924Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004925-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004926
4927- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4928
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004929- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4930
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004931- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4932 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004933
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004934- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4935 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4936 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4937 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4938 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4939 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004940 attributes.
4941
4942- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4943 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4944 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004945
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004946- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4947 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4948 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004949
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004950- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4951 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4952 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004953 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4954 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4955
4956- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4957 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004958
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004959Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004960-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004961
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004962- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4963 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4964
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004965- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4966 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4967 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4968 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4969
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004970- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4971 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4972 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4973 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4974
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004975 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4976 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4977 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4978 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4979 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4980 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4981 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4982 without losing information).
4983
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004984- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004985 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4986 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4987 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4988 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4989 module).
4990
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004991 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004992 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4993 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4994 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4995 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004996
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004997- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004998 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4999 encoding.
5000
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005001- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5002 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5003
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005004- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005005 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5006
5007- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5008 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5009 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5010 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5011
5012- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5013
5014- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5015 ON, and OFF.
5016
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005017- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5018 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5019
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005020Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005021-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005022
5023- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5024 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5025 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005026
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005027- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5028 been added: -X and -E.
5029
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005030Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005031-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005032
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005033- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5034 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5035
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005036C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005037-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005038
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005039- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5040 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5041 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5042 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5043 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5044
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005045- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5046 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5047 as long) arguments.
5048
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005049- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5050 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5051 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5052 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5053 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5054 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5055
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005056- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5057 input.
5058
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005059New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005060-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005061
5062Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005063-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005064
5065Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005066-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005067
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005068- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5069 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5070 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5071
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005072- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5073 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5074 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005075 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005076
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005077 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5078 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5079 import signal
5080 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005081
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005082 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005083 while 1:
5084 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005085 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005086 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5087 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5088 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5089 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005090
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005091
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005092What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5093===========================
5094
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005095*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5096
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005097Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005098--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005099
5100- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5101 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5102 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5103
5104- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5105 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5106 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5107 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5108 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5109 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5110 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005111
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005112- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005113 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005114 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5115 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5116 associate a docstring with a property.
5117
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005118- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5119 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5120 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5121 other built-in object types.
5122
5123- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5124 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5125 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5126 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5127 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5128
5129- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5130 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5131
5132- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5133 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005134 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005135 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5136 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5137 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5138 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5139 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5140
5141- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5142 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5143 class.
5144
5145- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5146 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5147 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5148 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5149
5150- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5151 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5152 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5153 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5154
5155- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5156 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5157
5158- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5159 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5160 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5161 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5162 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005163 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005164 with the same value as s.
5165
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005166- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5167
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005168Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005169----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005170
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005171- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5172
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005173- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5174 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5175 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5176 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5177 objects.
5178
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005179- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5180 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005181 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5182 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5183
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005184- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5185 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5186 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5187
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005188Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005189-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005190
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005191- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5192 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5193 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5194 by the instances.
5195
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005196- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5197 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5198 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5199
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005200- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5201 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5202 before the entire comparison is complete.
5203
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005204- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5205 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5206 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5207
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005208- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5209 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5210 getwriter().
5211
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005212- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5213 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5214
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005215- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005216 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5217 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5218
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005219- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5220 iterable object.
5221
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005222- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5223 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005224
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005225- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5226 authentication.
5227
5228- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5229 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005230
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005231- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005232 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5233 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5234 a sample driver.)
5235
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005236Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005237-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005238
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005239- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5240 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5241 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5242 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5243 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5244 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5245 kernel has large file support.
5246
5247- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5248 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5249 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5250 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5251 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5252
5253- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5254 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5255 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5256
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005257C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005258-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005259
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005260- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5261 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5262
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005263New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005264-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005265
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005266- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5267 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5268
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005269Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005270-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005271
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005272- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5273 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5274 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5275 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5276 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5277
5278- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5279 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5280 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5281 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5282
5283- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5284 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5285
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005286Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005287-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005288
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005289- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005290 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5291 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005292
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005293
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005294What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5295===========================
5296
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005297*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5298
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005299Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005300----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005301
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005302- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5303 big to represent as a C double.
5304
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005305- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5306 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5307 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5308 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5309 restriction).
5310
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005311- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5312 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5313 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5314 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5315 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5316
5317 >>> dir([])
5318 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5319 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5320 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5321 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5322 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5323 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5324 'reverse', 'sort']
5325
5326 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5327
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005328- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005329 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5330 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5331 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5332 OverflowError exception.
5333
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005334- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005335 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005336 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5337 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5338 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5339 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5340 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005341 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005342 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5343 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5344
5345 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5346 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5347 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5348 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005349
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005350- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005351 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5352 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5353 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5354 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5355 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5356 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5357 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5358 once it is created.
5359
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005360- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5361 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5362 (key, value) pairs.
5363
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005364- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005365 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5366 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5367
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005368- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5369 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5370 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5371 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5372 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005373
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005374- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005375 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5376 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5377
5378 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5379
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005380- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005381 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5382
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005383Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005384-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005385
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005386- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005387 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5388 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005389
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005390- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5391 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5392 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5393 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5394 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5395 in this area anymore).
5396
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005397- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5398 threading.Timer.
5399
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005400- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5401 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5402
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005403- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005404 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5405
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005406- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005407 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5408 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5409 converted to Python longs.
5410
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005411- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005412 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5413
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005414- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5415 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5416 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5417
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005418Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005419-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005420
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005421- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5422 division operators as per PEP 238.
5423
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005424Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005425-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005426
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005427- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5428 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5429 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5430 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5431
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005432C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005433-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005434
5435- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005436
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005437- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5438 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005439 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005440
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005441 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5442 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005443 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005444 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005445
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005446- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005447 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5448 module:
5449
5450 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005451
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005452 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5453 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005454
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005455 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5456 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005457
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005458 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5459
5460 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5461
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005462- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005463 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5464 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5465 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005466
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005467New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005468-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005469
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005470- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5471 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5472 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5473 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5474 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005475
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005476Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005477-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005478
5479Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005480-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005481
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005482- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5483 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5484 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5485 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005486 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5487 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5488 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5489 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5490 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005491
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005492- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005493 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5494
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005495
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005496What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5497===========================
5498
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005499*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5500
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005501Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005502-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005503
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005504- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5505 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5506
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005507- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5508 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5509 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005510
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005511- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5512 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5513 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5514 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005515
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005516- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5517
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005518- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005519
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005520Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005521-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005522
5523- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005524 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005525 the module docstring for details.
5526
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005527Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005528-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005529
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005530- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005531 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5532 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5533 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005534
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005535- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5536 Nick Mathewson.
5537
5538Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005539----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005540
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005541- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5542 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5543 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5544 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5545 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5546 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5547 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5548 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5549
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005550- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5551 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5552 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5553 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5554
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005555- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5556 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5557 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5558 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5559 come a long way).
5560
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005561- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5562 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5563 write filters for these warnings).
5564
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005565- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5566 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5567 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5568 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5569 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5570
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005571- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5572 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5573 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5574 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5575 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5576 older distribution.
5577
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005578Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005579-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005580
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005581- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5582 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005583 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005584
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005585- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5586 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5587 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5588
5589- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5590
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005591- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5592
5593- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5594
5595- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5596
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005597- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005598
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005599- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5600
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005601New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005602-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005603
5604C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005605-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005606
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005607- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5608 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5609 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5610 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5611 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5612 against buffer overruns.
5613
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005614- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005615 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5616 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005617 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5618 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5619 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5620
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005621- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5622 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5623 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5624 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5625 deprecated.
5626
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005627Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005628-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005629
5630- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5631 relevant is found.
5632
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005633
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005634What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005635===========================
5636
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005637*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5638
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005639Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005640----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005641
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005642- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5643 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5644 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5645 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5646 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5647 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5648 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5649 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005650 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005651 repaired.
5652
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005653- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005654 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005655 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5656 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5657 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5658 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5659 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5660 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5661 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5662 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5663
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005664- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5665 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5666 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5667 leading BMO character).
5668
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005669- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5670 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5671 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5672
5673 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5674 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5675 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005676
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005677 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5678 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5679 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5680 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5681 for various simple to use conversions.
5682
5683 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5684 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5685
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005686 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5687 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5688 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5689 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5690 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5691 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5692 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5693 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5694 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5695 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5696 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5697 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5698 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5699 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5700 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005701
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005702- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5703 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5704 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005705 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005706 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005707
5708 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005709 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5710 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5711 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5712 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5713 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005714 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5715 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005716
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005717 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5718 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5719 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005720 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005721
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005722- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5723 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5724 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5725 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5726 floating arithmetic,
5727
5728 x = 9007199254740992.0
5729 print long(x)
5730
5731 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5732 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5733 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5734 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5735 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5736 functions are of good quality).
5737
5738 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5739 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5740 algorithms to break.
5741
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005742- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5743 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5744 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5745 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5746 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5747 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5748 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5749 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5750 order.
5751
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005752- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5753 operation along the most common code paths.
5754
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005755- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5756 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5757
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005758- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5759 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5760 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5761 {}.update(UserDict())
5762
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005763- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5764 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5765 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5766 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5767 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5768 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5769 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5770 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5771
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005772- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005773 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005774
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005775 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005776 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5777 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005778 join() method of strings
5779 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005780 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5781 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005782 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005783 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005784
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005785- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5786 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5787
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005788- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5789 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5790
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005791- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5792 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5793 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5794 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5795
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005796- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5797 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005798 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005799 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5800 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005801
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005802- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5803
5804
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005805Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005806-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005807
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005808- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005809 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005810 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5811 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5812
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005813- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5814 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5815
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005816- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5817 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5818 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5819 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5820
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005821- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5822 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5823 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5824
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005825- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5826
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005827- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5828
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005829- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5830 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5831 that are still imported into string.py).
5832
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005833- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5834
5835- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5836 Now it does.
5837
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005838- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5839
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005840- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5841 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5842 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5843 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5844 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005845 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5846 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005847
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005848- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5849 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5850 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5851 'help(object)'.
5852
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005853Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005854-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005855
5856- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005857 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005858 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5859 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5860
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005861- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005862 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5863 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005864
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005865C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005866-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005867
5868- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5869 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005870
5871----
5872
5873**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**