blob: b27b169971b31e879fd86c4708f5029b8837ff23 [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
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000015- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
16 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
17 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
18 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
19 to the base class has been moved the prroper nb_* magic slot and out of
20 PyNumber_*().
21 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
22
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000023- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
24 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
25 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
26 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
27
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000028- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
29 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
30 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
31 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
32 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
33
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000034- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
35 disabled caused a crash.
36
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000037- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
38 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
39
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000040- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
41 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
42
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000043- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
44
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000045- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +000046 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
47 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
48 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000049
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000050- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
51
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000052- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
53 returning None.
54
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000055- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
56 ('\') with a specific error message.
57
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000058- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
59
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000060- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
61 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
62
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000063- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000064 an ferror() call.
65
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000066- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
67 list.sort().
68
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000069- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
70 (2+3) --> (5).
71
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000072- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
73
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +000074- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
75 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000076
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +000077- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
78 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
79 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
80
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000081Extension Modules
82-----------------
83
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000084- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
85 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
86
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +000087- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
88
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +000089- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
90 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
91 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
92
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +000093- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
94
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +000095- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
96 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
97
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +000098- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
99 file size.
100
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000101- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
102
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000103- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
104 {remove_history,replace_history}
105
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000106- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
107 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000108
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000109- stat_float_times is now True.
110
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000111- array.array objects are now picklable.
112
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000113- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
114 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
115
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000116- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
117 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
118 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
119
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000120- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
121 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000122
123Library
124-------
125
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000126- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
127 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
128 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
129 class at all.
130
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000131- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
132 files to PyPI.
133
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000134- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
135 them to PyPI.
136
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000137- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
138 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
139 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
140 work as expected.
141
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000142- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
143 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
144
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000145- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
146 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
147
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000148- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
149
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000150- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
151 to build.
152
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000153- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
154 symbolic links on Windows.
155
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000156- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
157 profile.py if available.
158
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000159- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
160
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000161- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
162 in LWPCookieJar.
163
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000164- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
165
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000166- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
167
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000168- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
169
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000170- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
171
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000172- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
173
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000174- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
175
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000176- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
177
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000178- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
179
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000180- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
181 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
182 be exploited in various ways.
183
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000184- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
185
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000186- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
187
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000188- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
189
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000190- Enhancements to the csv module:
191
192 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
193 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
194 PEP 305.
195 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
196 reporting.
197 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
198 dictates.
199 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000200 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000201 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000202 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
203 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000204 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
205 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000206 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000207 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
208 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
209 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
210 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
211 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
212 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
213 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
214 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
215 without first creating a dialect class.
216 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
217 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
218 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000219 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000220 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
221 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000222 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
223 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
224 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
225 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000226 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
227 This has been fixed.
228
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000229- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
230 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
231 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
232 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
233
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000234- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
235
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000236- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
237 (Bug #951915).
238
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000239- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
240 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
241 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
242 encoding alias table
243
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000244- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
245
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000246- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
247 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
248
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000249- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
250
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000251- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
252
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000253- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
254
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000255- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
256
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000257- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
258
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000259- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
260 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
261 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
262
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000263- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000264 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000265
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000266- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
267 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
268 tokenizer with very long source lines.
269
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000270- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
271 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
272
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000273- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
274 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000275
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000276- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
277 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
278
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000279- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
280 correctly.
281
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000282- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
283 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
284 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
285 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
286 between two lines.
287
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000288
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000289Build
290-----
291
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000292- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
293 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
294 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000295 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000296
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000297- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
298 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
299 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
300
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000301- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
302
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000303- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
304 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
305
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000306- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
307 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
308 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
309 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
310 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
311 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
312 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
313 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
314
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000315- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
316 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
317 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
318 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
319
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000320
321C API
322-----
323
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000324- Removed PyRange_New().
325
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000326
327Tests
328-----
329
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000330- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000331
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000332
333Documentation
334-------------
335
336- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
337 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
338 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
339
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000340Mac
341---
342
343
344
345Tools/Demos
346-----------
347
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000348- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000349
350
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000351What's New in Python 2.4 final?
352===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000353
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000354*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000355
356Core and builtins
357-----------------
358
359- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
360 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
361 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
362
363
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000364What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
365==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000366
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000367*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000368
369Core and builtins
370-----------------
371
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000372- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
373 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
374 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
375
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000376
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000377Library
378-------
379
380- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
381 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
382 raised is re-raised.
383
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000384- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
385 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
386
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000387- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
388 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
389 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
390 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
391 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
392 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
393 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
394 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
395 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
396 by the slice are recomputed now.
397
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000398- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000399
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000400Build
401-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000402
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000403- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
404 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
405 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000406
407C API
408-----
409
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000410- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
411
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000412
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000413What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
414================================
415
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000416*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000417
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000418License
419-------
420
421The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
422is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
423changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
424Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
425intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
426durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
427the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
428License::
429
430 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
431
432says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
433to Python 2.1.1.
434
435The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
436License Version 2.
437
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000438Core and builtins
439-----------------
440
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000441- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
442 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
443 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
444 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
445 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
446 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
447 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
448 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
449 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
450 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
451
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000452- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000453
454Extension Modules
455-----------------
456
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000457- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
458 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
459 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
460 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000461
462Library
463-------
464
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000465- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
466 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
467 returned.
468
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000469- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
470
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000471- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
472 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
473
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000474- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
475
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000476- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
477 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000478
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000479- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
480
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000481- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
482
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000483- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000484 the source code is updated and reloaded.
485
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000486Build
487-----
488
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000489- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000490
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000491What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
492================================
493
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000494*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000495
496Core and builtins
497-----------------
498
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000499- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000500 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
501
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000502- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
503 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
504 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
505 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
506
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000507- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
508 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
509
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000510- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
511 constant.
512
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000513- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
514 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
515 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
516 large), and to anomalies such as
517 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
518 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
519 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
520 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000521
522Extension modules
523-----------------
524
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000525- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
526 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000527 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
528 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
529 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000530
531Library
532-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000533
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000534- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000535 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000536 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
537 --swig-cpp.
538
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000539- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
540 it is set.
541
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000542- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000543
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000544- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
545 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
546 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
547 Closes bug #1039270.
548
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000549- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000550
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000551 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000552 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
553 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
554 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
555 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
556 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
557 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
558 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
559 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
560 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
561 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
562 + Updates to documentation.
563
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000564- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
565 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
566 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
567 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
568
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000569- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000570
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000571- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
572 applications should use the getmember function.
573
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000574- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
575
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000576- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
577 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
578 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
579 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
580 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
581 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
582 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
583 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
584 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
585
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000586- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
587 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000588 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000589
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000590- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
591 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
592 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
593 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
594 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
595 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
596 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
597 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000598
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000599- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
600 the new public features (of which there are many).
601
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000602- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000603 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
604 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
605 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
606 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000607 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000608
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000609- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
610
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000611- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
612 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
613 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
614 options.
615
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000616- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
617 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
618 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
619 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
620 conditions under which non-string values work.
621
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000622Build
623-----
624
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000625- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
626 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
627 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
628
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000629- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
630 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
631 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
632 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
633 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000634
635C API
636-----
637
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000638- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
639 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
640
641- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
642
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000643- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
644 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
645 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
646 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
647 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
648 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
649 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
650 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
651 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
652
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000653- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
654
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000655- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
656 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
657 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000658
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000659Tests
660-----
661
662- test__locale ported to unittest
663
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000664Mac
665---
666
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000667- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
668 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
669 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000670
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000671Tools/Demos
672-----------
673
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000674- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
675 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
676 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
677 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
678 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000679
680
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000681What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
682=================================
683
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000684*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000685
686Core and builtins
687-----------------
688
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000689- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000690 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
691
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000692- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
693 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
694 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
695 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
696 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
697 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
698 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
699 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000700 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
701 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
702 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
703 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
704 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000705
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000706- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
707 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
708 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
709 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
710 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
711
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000712- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
713
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000714- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
715 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
716
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000717- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
718 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
719 modified the list.
720
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000721- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
722 functions is now writable.
723
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000724- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
725 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
726 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
727 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
728
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000729- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
730 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
731 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
732 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
733 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000734
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000735- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
736 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
737
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000738Extension modules
739-----------------
740
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000741- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
742
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000743- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
744 data.
745
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000746- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
747 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
748 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
749 supposed to have been truncated away.
750
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000751- Added socket.socketpair().
752
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000753- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
754 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
755
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000756- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000757 versions of Python, have now been removed.
758
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000759Library
760-------
761
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000762- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000763 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000764
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000765- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
766 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
767
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000768- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
769 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
770
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000771- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
772
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000773- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
774 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000775
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000776- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
777 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
778
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000779- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
780
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000781- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
782
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000783- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
784
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000785- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
786 Percivall.
787
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000788- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
789 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
790
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000791- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
792 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
793 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000794 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000795
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000796- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
797 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
798 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
799 and exponent.
800
801- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
802
803- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
804 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
805 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
806
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000807- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
808 to the readline module.
809
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000810- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000811 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
812 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000813
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000814- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
815 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
816 contains symlinks.
817
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000818- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
819 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
820
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000821- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
822 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
823 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
824
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000825- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
826 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
827 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
828 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
829 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
830 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
831 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
832 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
833 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
834 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
835 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
836 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
837 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
838
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000839- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
840
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000841Tools/Demos
842-----------
843
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000844- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
845 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
846
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000847- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
848
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000849Build
850-----
851
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000852- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
853 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
854 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
855 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
856 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
857 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
858 plans to do so.
859
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000860- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
861 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
862
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000863- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
864 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
865
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000866- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
867 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
868
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000869- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
870 GNU/k*BSD systems.
871
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000872- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
873 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
874
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000875C API
876-----
877
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000878..
879
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000880Documentation
881-------------
882
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000883- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
884 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
885
886- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
887 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
888 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000889
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000890New platforms
891-------------
892
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000893- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
894
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000895Tests
896-----
897
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000898..
899
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000900Windows
901-------
902
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000903- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
904 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
905 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
906 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
907 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
908 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
909 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
910 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
911 the problem.
912
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000913Mac
914---
915
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000916..
917
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000918
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000919What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
920=================================
921
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000922*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000923
924Core and builtins
925-----------------
926
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000927- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
928 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
929 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
930 sensitive code.
931
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000932- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000933 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000934
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000935 @staticmethod
936 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000937
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000938 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000939
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000940- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
941 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
942 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
943 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
944 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
945 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
946 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
947 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
948 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
949 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
950 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
951
952 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
953 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
954 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
955 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
956 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
957 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
958 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
959
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000960- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
961 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
962
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000963- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000964 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000965
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000966- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000967 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000968 which was missing for no apparent reason.
969
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000970- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000971 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
972 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
973
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000974- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
975 types that support garbage collection.
976
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000977- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
978
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000979- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
980 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
981 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
982 Jython.
983
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000984- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
985
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000986- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
987 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
988
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000989- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
990 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
991 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000992
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000993- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
994 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
995 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
996
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000997Extension modules
998-----------------
999
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001000- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1001
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001002Library
1003-------
1004
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001005- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1006 TIS-620
1007
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001008- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1009 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1010 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1011 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1012 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1013 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1014 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1015 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1016 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1017 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1018
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001019- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1020
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001021- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1022 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1023 same as when the argument is omitted).
1024 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1025
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001026- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1027
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001028- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1029 schemes are offered.
1030
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001031- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1032
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001033- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1034 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1035 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1036
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001037- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1038
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001039- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1040 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1041
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001042- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1043 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1044 when dummy_threading is being used.
1045
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001046- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1047 from a tarfile.
1048
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001049- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001050 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001051
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001052- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1053 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1054 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1055 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1056
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001057- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1058 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1059
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001060- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1061 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1062 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1063 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1064 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1065 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1066 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1067 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1068 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1069 by some other method in progress).
1070
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001071- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1072 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1073 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001074
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001075- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1076
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001077- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1078 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1079 AM Kuchling.
1080
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001081- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1082 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1083 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1084
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001085- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1086 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1087 instead of unsigned.
1088
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001089- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001090 no longer part of the public API.
1091
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001092- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1093 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1094 string methods of the same name).
1095
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001096- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001097 SF patch 945642.
1098
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001099- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1100
1101 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1102
1103 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1104 DocTestSuites.
1105
1106- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1107 that provide thread-local data.
1108
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001109- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1110 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1111
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001112- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1113
1114- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1115 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1116 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1117
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001118- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1119
1120 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1121 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1122 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001123
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001124 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1125 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1126 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1127 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1128
1129 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1130 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1131
1132 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1133 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1134 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1135 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1136
1137 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1138 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1139 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1140 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1141 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1142
1143 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1144 wrapping help output.
1145
1146 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1147 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1148 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001149
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001150C API
1151-----
1152
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001153- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1154 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1155 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1156 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1157 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1158 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1159 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1160 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1161 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1162 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1163 its visible semantics have not changed.
1164
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001165- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1166 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1167
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001168Documentation
1169-------------
1170
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001171- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001172
1173 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001174 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001175
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001176 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001177
1178 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1179
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001180- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001181
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001182Tests
1183-----
1184
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001185- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001186 platforms that use the Makefile.
1187
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001188- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1189 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1190 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1191
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001192
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001193What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1194=================================
1195
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001196*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001197
1198Core and builtins
1199-----------------
1200
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001201- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1202 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1203 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1204 objects now (one object instead of three).
1205
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001206- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1207 Windows DLLs.
1208
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001209- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1210 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001211
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001212- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1213 a new .pyc magic.
1214
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001215- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1216 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1217 be there.
1218
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001219- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1220 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1221 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1222
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001223- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1224 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1225 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1226
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001227- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1228
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001229- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1230 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1231 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001232
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001233- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1234 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1235
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001236- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1237
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001238- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001239 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001240
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001241- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1242
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001243- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1244
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001245- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1246 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1247
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001248- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1249 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1250 Fixes bug #858016 .
1251
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001252- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1253 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1254 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1255
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001256- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1257 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1258 improves their performance (about 35%).
1259
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001260- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1261 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1262 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1263
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001264- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1265 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1266 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1267 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1268
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001269- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1270 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001271 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001272 length is not known).
1273
1274- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1275 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001276 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1277 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001278 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1279
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001280- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1281 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1282
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001283- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1284 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1285 keyword arguments.
1286
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001287- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1288 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1289 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1290
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001291- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1292 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1293 cases.
1294
1295- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1296 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1297 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1298 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1299 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1300 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1301 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1302 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1303 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1304 a release build.
1305
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001306- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1307 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1308
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001309- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001310 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001311
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001312- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1313 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1314 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1315 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1316 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1317 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1318 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1319 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1320 destroyed.
1321
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001322- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1323 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1324 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1325 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1326 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1327 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1328 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1329 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1330
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001331- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1332 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1333 character other than a space.
1334
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001335- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1336 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1337 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1338 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1339 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1340 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1341 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1342 attributes with the same name.
1343
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001344- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1345 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1346 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1347 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1348 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1349 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1350 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1351 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1352 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1353 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1354 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1355 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1356 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1357 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001358
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001359- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1360 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1361 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1362 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1363 This has been repaired.
1364
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001365- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1366
1367- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1368
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001369- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1370 over a sequence.
1371
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001372- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001373 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001374
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001375- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1376
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001377- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1378 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1379 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1380 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1381 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1382 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1383 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1384 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1385
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001386- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1387 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1388 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1389
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001390- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1391 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1392 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1393 freelist.
1394
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001395- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1396 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1397
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001398- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1399 number.
1400
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001401- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1402 a TypeError exception.
1403
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001404- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1405 820195.
1406
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001407- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1408 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1409 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1410
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001411- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001412 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1413 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001414
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001415- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1416 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1417 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1418
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001419- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1420 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001421 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001422
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001423- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001424 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1425 the first call.
1426
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001427
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001428Extension modules
1429-----------------
1430
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001431- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1432 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1433
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001434- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1435 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1436 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1437 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1438 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1439 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1440 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001441
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001442- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1443
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001444- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1445
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001446- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1447 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1448
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001449- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1450 fewer false positives.
1451
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001452- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1453 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1454
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001455- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001456 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1457
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001458- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001459 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001460 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001461 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1462 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001463
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001464- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1465 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1466 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1467 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1468
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001469- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1470 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1471 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1472 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1473 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1474 #897625.
1475
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001476- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1477 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1478
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001479- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1480 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1481 and pops on either side of the deque.
1482
1483- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1484 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1485
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001486- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1487 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1488 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1489 other functions that expect a function argument.
1490
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001491- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1492
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001493- os.getsid was added.
1494
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001495- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1496 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1497 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1498
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001499- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1500
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001501- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1502
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001503- readline.clear_history was added.
1504
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001505- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1506
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001507- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1508
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001509- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1510
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001511- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1512
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001513- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1514
1515- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1516
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001517- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1518
1519- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1520
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001521- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1522 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1523 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1524
1525- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1526 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1527 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1528 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1529 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1530 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1531 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1532
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001533- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1534 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1535 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1536 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001537
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001538- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001539 iterators from a single iterable.
1540
1541- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1542 of raising a TypeError exception.
1543
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001544- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1545 as parameter.
1546
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001547Library
1548-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001549
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001550- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1551 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1552 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001553
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001554- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1555 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1556 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001557
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001558- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001559
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001560- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1561 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001562
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001563- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1564 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1565
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001566- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1567
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001568- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001569 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001570
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001571- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001572 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001573
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001574- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1575
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001576- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1577 on cygwin and mingw32.
1578
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001579- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1580
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001581- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1582 module.
1583
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001584- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1585 installation scheme for all platforms.
1586
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001587- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001588 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001589
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001590- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1591 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1592 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1593
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001594- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1595 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1596 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1597
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001598- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1599
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001600- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1601
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001602- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1603 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1604
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001605- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1606 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1607 type pattern with the same value exists.
1608
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001609- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1610 when run from the command prompt).
1611
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001612- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1613 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1614
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001615- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1616 default sort).
1617
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001618- Added global runctx function to profile module
1619
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001620- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1621
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001622- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1623
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001624- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1625
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001626- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001627 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1628 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1629 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1630 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1631 accordingly.
1632
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001633- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1634 decoding standards.
1635
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001636- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1637 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1638 called for all requests.
1639
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001640- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1641 they are passed to the compiler.
1642
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001643- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1644 indent, width and depth.
1645
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001646- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1647 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1648
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001649- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1650 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1651
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001652- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1653
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001654- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1655
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001656- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1657
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001658- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1659 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1660
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001661- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001662 for better performance.
1663
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001664- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001665
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001666- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1667 a string).
1668
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001669- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1670
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001671- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1672
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001673- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1674
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001675- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1676
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001677- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1678 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1679 list of fieldnames.
1680
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001681- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1682 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1683
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001684- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1685
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001686- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1687 empty lists.
1688
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001689- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1690 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1691 and shelves.
1692
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001693- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1694 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1695
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001696- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001697 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1698 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001699
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001700- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1701 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001702 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001703
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001704- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001705 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1706 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1707
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001708- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1709 and removed in Py2.4.
1710
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001711- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1712
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001713- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1714
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001715Tools/Demos
1716-----------
1717
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001718- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1719 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1720
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001721- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1722
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001723- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1724 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1725 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1726 destination in situations where both files are given.
1727
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001728- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1729 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1730 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1731 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1732
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001733- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1734
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001735- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1736 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1737 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1738 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1739 now.
1740
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001741- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1742 in effect
1743
1744- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1745 C-c C-h
1746
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001747- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1748 -d option was given.
1749
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001750Build
1751-----
1752
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001753- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1754 build under OS X.
1755
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001756- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1757 --enable-profiling.
1758
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001759- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1760 is configured --with-tsc.
1761
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001762- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1763 on AMD64.
1764
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001765- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1766 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1767
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001768- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1769 removed.
1770
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001771- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1772 supported (see PEP 11).
1773
1774- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1775
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001776- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1777
1778- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1779 (see PEP 11).
1780
1781- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1782 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1783
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001784C API
1785-----
1786
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001787- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1788 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1789 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1790
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001791- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1792 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1793 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1794 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1795
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001796- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1797 generator objects.
1798
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001799- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1800 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001801 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1802 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001803
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001804- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1805 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1806
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001807- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1808 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1809 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1810 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1811 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1812
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001813- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1814 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1815 about 10% faster.
1816
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001817- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1818 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1819
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001820- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1821 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1822 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1823 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1824
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001825Windows
1826-------
1827
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001828- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1829 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1830 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1831 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1832
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001833- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1834 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1835 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1836
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001837
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001838What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1839===============================
1840
1841*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1842
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001843IDLE
1844----
1845
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001846- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1847 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1848 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1849 context-menu actions.
1850
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001851- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1852 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1853 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1854 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1855 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1856 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1857 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1858 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1859 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1860
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001861
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001862What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1863=============================================
1864
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001865*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001866
1867Core and builtins
1868-----------------
1869
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001870- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001871 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001872 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1873
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001874Extension modules
1875-----------------
1876
1877- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1878 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1879 than once. This has been fixed.
1880
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001881- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1882 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1883 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1884 call.
1885
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001886- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1887
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001888Library
1889-------
1890
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001891- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1892 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1893
1894- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1895 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1896 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1897 restored.
1898
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001899IDLE
1900----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001901
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001902- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001903
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001904Build
1905-----
1906
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001907- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1908 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1909
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001910C API
1911-----
1912
1913Windows
1914-------
1915
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001916- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1917 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1918
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001919- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1920
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001921Mac
1922---
1923
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001924- Various fixes to pimp.
1925
1926- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1927
1928- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1929 more problems than it solves.
1930
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001931
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001932What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1933=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001934
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001935*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1936
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001937Core and builtins
1938-----------------
1939
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001940- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1941 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1942
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001943- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1944 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001945 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001946
1947- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1948 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1949 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001950 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001951
1952- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1953 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001954
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001955- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1956 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1957 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1958
1959- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001960 770247.
1961
1962- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001963
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001964Extension modules
1965-----------------
1966
1967- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1968 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1969
1970- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1971
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001972- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1973
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001974- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1975 contained within the _strptime module.
1976
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001977- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1978 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1979
1980- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001981 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1982
1983- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1984 the find_class attribute, if present.
1985
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001986- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001987
1988 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1989 (SF bug 763298).
1990
1991 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001992 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1993 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1994 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001995
1996 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1997
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001998Library
1999-------
2000
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002001- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2002
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002003- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2004 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2005 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2006 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2007 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2008 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2009 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2010 or Tester().
2011
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002012- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2013 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2014 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2015 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2016 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2017 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2018 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2019 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2020 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002021
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002022 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002023
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002024- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2025 weren't before was an oversight.
2026
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002027- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2028 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2029
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002030- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2031 when there are no lines.
2032
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002033- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2034 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2035
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002036- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2037 to child processes.
2038
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002039- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2040
2041- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2042
2043- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2044 xmlrpclib.
2045
2046- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2047 responses.
2048
2049- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2050 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2051
2052- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2053 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2054 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2055
2056- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2057 used as patterns.
2058
2059- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2060 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2061 than Tk 8.3.
2062
2063- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2064
2065- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002066
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002067Tools/Demos
2068-----------
2069
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002070- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2071
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002072- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2073
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002074- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002075
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002076Build
2077-----
2078
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002079- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2080
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002081- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2082
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002083- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2084 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002085
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002086- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2087 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2088 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002089
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002090C API
2091-----
2092
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002093- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2094 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2095
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002096Windows
2097-------
2098
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002099- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2100 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2101 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2102 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2103 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2104 Python exception ::
2105
2106 thread.error: can't start new thread
2107
2108 is raised now.
2109
2110- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2111 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2112 instead of from DLL teardown.
2113
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002114Mac
2115---
2116
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002117- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002118 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002119 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2120 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2121 the executable in the bundle.
2122
2123- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002124
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002125- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2126
2127- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2128 on Panther.
2129
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002130What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2131================================
2132
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002133*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002134
2135Core and builtins
2136-----------------
2137
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002138- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2139 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2140 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2141 with the -i option.
2142
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002143- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2144 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2145
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002146- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2147 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2148
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002149- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2150 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2151 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2152 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2153 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2154 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2155 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2156 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2157 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2158 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2159 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2160 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2161 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002162
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002163- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2164 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2165 embedded in a lambda expression.
2166
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002167- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2168 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2169 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2170 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2171 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2172
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002173- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2174 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2175 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2176
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002177- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2178 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2179
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002180- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2181 It's writable again.
2182
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002183- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2184 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2185 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002186 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002187
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002188- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2189 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2190 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2191
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002192Extension modules
2193-----------------
2194
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002195- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2196 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2197
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002198- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2199 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2200 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2201 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2202
2203- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2204 collection.
2205
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002206- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2207 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2208 unique within a single program run.
2209
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002210- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2211 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2212
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002213- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2214 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2215
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002216- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2217 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002218
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002219- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2220
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002221- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2222 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2223
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002224- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2225 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2226 for many BSD-derived systems.
2227
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002228
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002229Library
2230-------
2231
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002232- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2233 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2234 primary ones:
2235
2236 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2237 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2238 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2239
2240 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2241 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2242 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2243 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2244 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2245 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2246
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002247- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2248 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2249 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2250 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2251 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2252 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2253 argument.
2254
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002255- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2256 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2257 in the archive.
2258
2259- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2260 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2261
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002262- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2263 569574).
2264
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002265- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2266 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2267 no more.
2268
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002269- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2270 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2271 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2272 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2273 code coverage.
2274
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002275- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2276 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2277 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002278 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2279 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002280
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002281- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2282 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2283 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002284 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002285
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002286- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2287
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002288- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2289 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2290 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2291 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2292
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002293- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2294 handling.
2295
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002296- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2297 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2298
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002299- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2300 in socket.py.
2301
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002302- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2303
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002304- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2305 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2306 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2307 opener with proxy support.
2308
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002309- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2310
2311- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2312
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002313Tools/Demos
2314-----------
2315
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002316- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2317
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002318- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2319
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002320- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2321 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002322
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002323- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2324 files.
2325
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002326Build
2327-----
2328
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002329- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002330 different root directory.
2331
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002332C API
2333-----
2334
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002335- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2336 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2337 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2338 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2339 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2340 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2341 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2342 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2343 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2344 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2345
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002346- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2347 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2348 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2349 from Python.
2350
2351
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002352New platforms
2353-------------
2354
2355None this time.
2356
2357Tests
2358-----
2359
2360- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2361 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2362
2363Windows
2364-------
2365
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002366- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2367
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002368- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2369 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2370 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2371 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2372 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2373 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2374 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2375 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2376 that's what it's for.
2377
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002378Mac
2379---
2380
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002381- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2382 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2383 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2384 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002385- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2386 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2387- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002388
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002389SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2390------------------------------------
2391
2392430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2393598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2394622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2395661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2396683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2397697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2398713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2399724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2400727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2401729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2402730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2403731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2404732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2405733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2406735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2407740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2408744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2409745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2410747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2411749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2412751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2413753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2414755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2415757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2416760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2417
2418
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002419What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2420================================
2421
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002422*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002423
2424Core and builtins
2425-----------------
2426
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002427- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2428 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2429
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002430- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2431 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2432 and cannot be strings).
2433
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002434- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2435 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2436 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2437 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2438
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002439- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2440 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2441 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2442 Python itself.
2443
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002444- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2445 the referenced object, if it has one.
2446
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002447- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2448 the thread started at
2449 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2450
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002451- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2452 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2453 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2454 placed on a list index.
2455
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002456- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2457 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2458 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2459 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2460
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002461- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2462 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2463 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2464 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2465 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2466 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2467 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2468
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002469- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2470 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2471 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2472 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2473 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2474
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002475- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2476 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002477
2478- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2479 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2480 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2481 #693195.)
2482
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002483- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2484 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002485
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002486- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002487 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002488 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2489 interpreter executions, would fail.
2490
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002491- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002492 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002493 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002494
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002495Extension modules
2496-----------------
2497
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002498- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2499 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2500 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2501 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2502
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002503- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2504 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2505
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002506- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2507 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2508 and Greg Chapman.)
2509
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002510- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2511 recursively.
2512
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002513- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002514 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2515 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2516 leaks.
2517
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002518- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2519
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002520- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2521 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2522 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2523 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2524 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2525 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2526 #705836.
2527
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002528- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002529 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2530
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002531- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2532 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2533 See SF bug #692416.
2534
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002535- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2536 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2537
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002538- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2539 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2540 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002541
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002542- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002543 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2544 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2545
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002546- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2547 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2548 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2549 timeouts to work properly.
2550
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002551Library
2552-------
2553
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002554- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2555 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2556 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2557 future release.
2558
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002559- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2560 for querying platform dependent features.
2561
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002562- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002563
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002564- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2565 pickle protocol versions.
2566
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002567- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2568 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2569 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2570
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002571- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2572
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002573- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2574 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2575 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2576 modules.
2577
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002578- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2579 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2580 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2581
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002582- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2583 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2584
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002585- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2586 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2587 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2588
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002589- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002590 MS Office extensions.
2591
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002592- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2593 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2594
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002595- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2596 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2597
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002598- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2599 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2600 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2601 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2602 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2603 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2604
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002605- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2606 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2607 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002608
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002609- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2610 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2611 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2612
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002613- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2614
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002615- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2616 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2617 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2618
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002619Tools/Demos
2620-----------
2621
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002622- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2623 See the module docstring for details.
2624
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002625Build
2626-----
2627
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002628- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2629 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002630
2631C API
2632-----
2633
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002634- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2635
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002636- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2637 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2638 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2639
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002640- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2641 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002642
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002643 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2644 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2645 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002646
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002647- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002648 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2649
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002650- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2651 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2652 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002653
2654New platforms
2655-------------
2656
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002657None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002658
2659Tests
2660-----
2661
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002662- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2663 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002664
2665Windows
2666-------
2667
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002668- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2669 function.
2670
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002671- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2672 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002673
2674Mac
2675---
2676
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002677- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2678 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002679
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002680- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2681 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002682
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002683- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2684 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2685 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002686
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002687- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002688 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2689 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002690
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002691- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2692 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002693
2694
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002695What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2696=================================
2697
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002698*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002699
2700Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002701-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002702
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002703- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2704 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2705 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2706
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002707- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2708 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2709 (SF patch #664376.)
2710
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002711- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2712 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2713 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2714 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2715 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2716 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002717 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002718
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002719- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2720 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2721 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2722 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002723 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002724
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002725- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2726 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2727 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2728 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2729 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2730 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2731 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2732 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2733 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2734 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2735 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2736
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002737- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2738 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2739 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2740 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2741 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2742 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2743
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002744- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2745 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2746
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002747- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2748 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2749 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2750 case.)
2751
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002752- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2753 passed as unicode strings.
2754
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002755- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2756 See SF bug #683467.
2757
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002758- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2759 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2760
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002761- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2762
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002763- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2764
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002765- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2766 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2767 arguments.
2768
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002769- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2770 See SF bug #667147.
2771
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002772- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002773 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002774 See SF bug #676155.
2775
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002776- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002777 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002778 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2779 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2780 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2781 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2782 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2783 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002784
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002785Extension modules
2786-----------------
2787
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002788- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2789 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2790 tp_as_number pointer.
2791
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002792- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2793 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2794 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2795 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2796 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2797
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002798- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2799
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002800- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2801
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002802- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002803 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002804 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2805 patch #678531.)
2806
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002807- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2808 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2809
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002810- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2811 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2812
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002813- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2814
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002815- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2816 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2817 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2818
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002819- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2820
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002821- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2822 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2823
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002824- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002825
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002826- datetime changes:
2827
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002828 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2829
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002830 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2831 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2832 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2833 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2834 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2835 now.
2836
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002837 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002838 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2839 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002840
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002841 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002842 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002843 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2844 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2845 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2846 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002847
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002848 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2849 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2850 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002851 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2852
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002853 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2854 by a later example coded by Guido.
2855
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002856 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002857 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2858 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2859 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002860 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2861 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2862
2863 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2864 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2865 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2866 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2867 tzinfo subclass instance.
2868
2869 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2870 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2871 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2872 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2873 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2874 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2875 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2876 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002877
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002878 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2879 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2880 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2881 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2882 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002883 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2884
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002885 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002886
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002887 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2888 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2889 as a naive datetime object.
2890
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002891 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2892 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2893 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2894
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002895 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2896 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2897 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2898 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2899 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2900 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2901 comparison.
2902
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002903 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2904 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2905 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2906 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002907 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002908
2909 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002910
2911 and ::
2912
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002913 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2914
2915 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2916 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2917 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2918 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2919
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002920 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2921 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2922 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2923 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2924 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2925
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002926 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2927 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002928 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2929 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002930
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002931Library
2932-------
2933
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002934- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2935 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2936
2937- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2938 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2939 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2940 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2941 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2942 See PEP 307 for details.
2943
2944- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2945 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2946
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002947- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2948 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002949 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002950 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2951 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002952 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002953
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002954- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2955 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2956
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002957- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2958 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2959 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2960
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002961- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2962
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002963- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2964 exception.
2965
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002966- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2967 class.
2968
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002969- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2970 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2971 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2972
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002973- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2974 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2975
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002976- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002977 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2978 See SF bug #659228.
2979
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002980- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2981 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2982 See SF patch #651082.
2983
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002984- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002985
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002986- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2987 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2988
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002989- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002990 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002991
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002992- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2993 DOS paths from other platforms.
2994
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002995Tools/Demos
2996-----------
2997
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002998- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2999 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3000 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3001 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3002 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3003 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3004 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3005 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3006 example:
3007
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003008 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3009 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003010
3011 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3012
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003013
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003014Build
3015-----
3016
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003017- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3018 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3019 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003020 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3021
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003022 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3023
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003024- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3025 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3026 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3027 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3028 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3029 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3030 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3031 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3032 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3033
3034- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3035 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3036 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3037 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3038
3039- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3040 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3041
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003042C API
3043-----
3044
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003045- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3046 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003047
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003048- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3049 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3050 tp_as_number pointer.
3051
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003052- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3053 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3054 (SF #681367)
3055
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003056- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3057 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3058 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3059 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003060
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003061Tests
3062-----
3063
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003064- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003065 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3066 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3067 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3068 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3069 pydoc.)
3070
3071- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3072
3073- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003074
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003075Windows
3076-------
3077
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003078- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3079 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3080 time).
3081
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003082- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3083 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3084
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003085- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3086 release without strong cryptography.
3087
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003088- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003089 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003090
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003091- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3092 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3093
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003094Mac
3095---
3096
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003097- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3098 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003099
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003100- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3101 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3102 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003103
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003104- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3105 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003106
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003107- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3108 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3109 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3110 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003111
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003112- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003113 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3114 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3115 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003116
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003117
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003118What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003119=================================
3120
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003121*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003122
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003123Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003124--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003125
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003126- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3127
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003128- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3129 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003130 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003131 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003132 a different meaning than before.
3133
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003134- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003135 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003136 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003137
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003138- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003139 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003140 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003141
3142- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3143 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3144 and deallocation.
3145
3146- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3147 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3148
3149- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3150 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3151 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3152 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3153 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3154
3155- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3156 now detected by the garbage collector.
3157
3158- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3159 [SF bug 519621]
3160
3161- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3162 identifier.
3163
3164- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3165 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3166 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3167 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3168 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3169 [SF bug 563060]
3170
3171- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3172 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3173 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3174 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3175 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3176
3177- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3178 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3179 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3180
3181- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3182
3183- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3184 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3185 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3186 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3187 state of the slots would be lost.)
3188
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003189Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003190-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003191
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003192- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003193 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3194 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3195 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3196 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003197 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3198 Jython 2.1.
3199
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003200- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003201 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003202 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3203 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3204 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3205 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3206 these, see PEP 302.
3207
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003208- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3209 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3210 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3211
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003212- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3213 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3214 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3215
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003216- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3217 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3218 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3219
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003220- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3221 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3222 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3223 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3224 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3225 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3226 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3227 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3228 releases or implementations.
3229
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003230- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003231 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3232 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003233
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003234- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3235 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3236
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003237- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3238 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3239 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3240
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003241- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3242 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3243
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003244- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3245 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003246 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3247 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003248
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003249- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3250 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3251 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3252 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3253 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3254
3255 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3256 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3257 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3258 pattern.
3259
3260 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3261 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3262 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3263 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3264
3265 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3266 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3267 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3268 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3269 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3270 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3271
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003272- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3273 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3274 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3275 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3276 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3277 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3278 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3279 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003280
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003281- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3282 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3283 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3284 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3285 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003286 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3287 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3288 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3289 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3290 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3291 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3292 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003293
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003294- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3295 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3296
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003297- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3298 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3299 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3300 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3301 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3302 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3303 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3304 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3305 to Zack Weinberg!
3306
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003307- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3308 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3309 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3310 type. This has been fixed now.
3311
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003312- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3313 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3314 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3315
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003316- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3317 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3318 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3319 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3320 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3321 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3322 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3323 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003324 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003325
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003326- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3327 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3328 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003329
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003330- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3331 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3332 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3333 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3334 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3335 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3336 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3337 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003338 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003339 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3340 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3341
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003342- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3343 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3344 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3345 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3346 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3347 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3348 this.)
3349
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003350- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3351 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003352 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003353 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003354 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3355 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003356 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3357 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003358
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003359- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3360 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3361 currently running.
3362
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003363- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3364 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3365 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3366 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3367
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003368- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3369 as directory names.
3370
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003371- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3372 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3373
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003374- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3375 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3376
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003377- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003378 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3379 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003380
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003381- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3382 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3383 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3384 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3385 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3386
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003387- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3388 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3389 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3390 removed.
3391
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003392- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3393 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3394 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3395
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003396- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3397 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3398 to __debug__.
3399
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003400- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3401 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3402 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3403
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003404- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3405 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3406 deprecated now.
3407
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003408- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3409 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3410 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003411
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003412- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3413 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3414 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3415 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3416 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003417
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003418- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3419 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3420
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003421- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3422 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3423 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003424 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003425 is backward compatible.
3426
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003427- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3428 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3429 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3430 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3431 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3432
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003433- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3434 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3435 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3436 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3437 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3438 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003439
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003440- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3441 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3442
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003443- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3444 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3445
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003446- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3447 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3448 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3449 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3450 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3451
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003452- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3453 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3454 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3455
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003456- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003457 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3458
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003459- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3460 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3461 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003462
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003463- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3464 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3465
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003466- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3467 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3468 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3469
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003470- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3471
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003472Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003473-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003474
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003475- Added three operators to the operator module:
3476 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3477 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3478 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3479
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003480- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3481
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003482- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3483 archives.
3484
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003485- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3486 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3487 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3488
3489 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3490
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003491- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3492 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3493 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003494 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003495
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003496- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3497 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3498 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3499 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003500 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3501 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3502 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3503 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003504
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003505- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3506 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003507
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003508- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3509
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003510- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3511 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3512
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003513- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3514 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3515 supported.
3516
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003517- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3518
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003519- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3520 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003521
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003522- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3523 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3524
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003525- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3526
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003527- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3528 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3529
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003530- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3531 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3532 functions but callable type objects.
3533
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003534- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003535 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003536 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003537
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003538- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3539 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003540
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003541- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3542 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003543
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003544- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3545 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3546 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3547 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3548
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003549- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3550 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003551
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003552- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3553 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3554 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3555 and __imul__.
3556
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003557- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003558 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3559 is called.
3560
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003561- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3562 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3563 interpreter was compiled.
3564
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003565- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3566 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3567 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003568 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003569 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3570 1, not 2.
3571
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003572- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3573 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3574 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3575 limit.
3576
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003577- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3578 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3579 bug #623464.
3580
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003581- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3582 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3583 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3584 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3585
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003586Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003587-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003588
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003589- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3590
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003591- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3592 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3593 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3594 with Python 2.3a2.
3595
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003596- os.path exposes getctime.
3597
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003598- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003599 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003600 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003601 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003602 unit tests of floating point results.
3603
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003604- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3605 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3606 has been increased.
3607
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003608- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3609 executed.
3610
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003611- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3612 postinstallation script.
3613
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003614- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3615 test the current module.
3616
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003617- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003618 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3619 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3620 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3621 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3622
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003623- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003624 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003625 Ward's Optik package.
3626
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003627- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3628 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3629 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3630 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3631
3632- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3633 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003634 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003635
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003636- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3637 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3638 shelf are binary pickles.
3639
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003640- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3641 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3642
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003643- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3644 modules are iterators now.
3645
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003646- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3647 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3648 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3649 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3650 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3651 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003652
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003653- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3654 with their entity value.
3655
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003656- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3657
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003658- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3659 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003660
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003661- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3662 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003663 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003664
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003665- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3666 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3667 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3668 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3669 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3670 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3671 main():
3672
3673 import locale
3674 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3675
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003676- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3677 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3678
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003679- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3680 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3681 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3682 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3683 to the new standard.
3684
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003685- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3686 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3687 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3688 an extension to the database.
3689
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003690- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3691 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3692 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3693 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003694 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003695
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003696- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003697 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003698
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003699- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3700 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3701 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3702 bounded integers.
3703
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003704- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3705 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3706 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3707 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3708 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3709 in existence.
3710
3711 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3712 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3713 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3714 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3715 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3716 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3717
3718 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3719 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3720 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3721 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3722
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003723- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3724 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3725 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3726
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003727- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3728
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003729- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3730 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3731 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3732 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3733
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003734- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3735 argument.
3736
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003737- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3738 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3739 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3740 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3741 [SF patch 560794].
3742
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003743- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3744 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3745 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003746 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3747 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3748 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003749
3750- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3751 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003752
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003753- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3754 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3755 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3756 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003757
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003758- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3759 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3760 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3761 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3762 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3763
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003764- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003765
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003766- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3767
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003768- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3769 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3770 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3771 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3772 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3773 identical to None.
3774
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003775- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3776 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3777 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3778 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3779 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3780 results now.
3781
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003782- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3783 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3784
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003785- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3786 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3787 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3788 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3789 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3790 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3791 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3792 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3793
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003794- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3795
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003796- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3797 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3798
3799- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3800 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3801 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3802 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3803 and other systems.
3804
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003805- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3806 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3807 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3808 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 +00003809 work well with these.
3810
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003811- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3812
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003813- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003814 connections.
3815
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003816- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3817 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3818 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3819
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003820- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3821 sets
3822
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003823- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3824 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3825 name.
3826
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003827- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3828 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3829 passed in.
3830
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003831- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003832 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003833 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3834 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003835
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003836- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3837
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003838- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3839
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003840- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3841 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3842 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3843
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003844- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3845 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3846 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3847 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003848 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003849
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003850- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003851 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003852 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003853
3854- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3855 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3856 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3857
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003858- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003859 the value of its expression argument.
3860
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003861- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3862 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3863 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3864
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003865- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3866 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3867 skipstone browser was included.
3868
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003869- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3870 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3871
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003872Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003873-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003874
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003875- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3876 names in addition to accepting file names.
3877
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003878- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3879 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3880 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3881 still used and useful.)
3882
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003883- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3884 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3885 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3886 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003887
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003888- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3889 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3890 the generated binary.
3891
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003892Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003893-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003894
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003895- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3896
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003897- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3898 except in the hands of experts.
3899
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003900- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003901 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3902 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3903 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003904
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003905- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3906 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3907 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3908 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3909 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3910 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3911 builds.
3912
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003913- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3914 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3915 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3916 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3917 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3918 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3919 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3920 new type.
3921
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003922- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003923
3924 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3925 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3926 positive infinities.
3927
3928 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3929 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3930 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3931 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3932 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3933 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3934 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3935
3936 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3937
3938 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3939
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003940- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3941 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3942 size of the executable.
3943
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003944- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3945 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3946 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3947 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003948
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003949- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3950
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003951- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3952 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3953 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003954
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003955- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3956 well as Unix.
3957
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003958- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3959 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3960 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3961 modules in the README file for details.
3962
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003963C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003964-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003965
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003966- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3967 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003968 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003969 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003970 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003971
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003972- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3973 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3974 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3975 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3976 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3977 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003978 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003979 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3980 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3981 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3982 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3983 aligned.)
3984
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003985- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3986 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3987 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3988
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003989- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3990 level.
3991
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003992- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3993 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3994 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3995 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3996 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3997
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003998- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3999 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4000 code.
4001
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004002- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4003 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4004 adjusting for negative indices.
4005
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004006- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4007 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4008 object.
4009
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004010- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4011 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4012 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4013
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004014- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4015 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004016
4017- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4018
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004019- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4020 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4021 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4022 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4023
4024- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4025
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004026- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004027
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004028- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004029 without going through the buffer API.
4030
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004031- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004032
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004033- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4034 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4035 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4036 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4037
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004038- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4039 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4040
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004041- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004042 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4043
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004044New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004045-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004046
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004047- OpenVMS is now supported.
4048
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004049- AtheOS is now supported.
4050
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004051- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4052
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004053- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4054
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004055Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004056-----
4057
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004058- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4059 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4060 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004061
4062Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004063-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004064
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004065- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4066 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4067 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4068 bugs.
4069 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004070 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004071 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4072 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004073 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004074
4075- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004076 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004077
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004078- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4079 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4080
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004081- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4082 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004083 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004084 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4085
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004086- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4087 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4088 use files" uninstall option).
4089
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004090- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4091
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004092- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4093 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4094
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004095- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4096 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4097 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4098
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004099- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4100 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4101 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4102 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4103 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004104 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4105 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4106 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004107
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004108- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004109 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004110 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4111 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4112 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4113 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4114 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4115 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4116 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4117 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4118 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4119 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4120 work around.
4121
4122- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4123 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4124 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4125 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4126 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4127 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4128 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4129 specified with O_CREAT too).
4130
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004131Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004132----
4133
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004134- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004135
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004136- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4137 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4138 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4139
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004140- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4141 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4142 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4143
4144- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4145 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4146 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4147 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4148 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4149 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4150 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4151 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004152
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004153- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4154 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4155 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004156
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004157- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4158 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4159 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4160 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4161 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004162
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004163- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4164 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4165 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004166
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004167- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4168 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004169
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004170- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4171 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4172 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4173 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4174 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004175
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004176- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4177 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4178 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4179
4180- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4181 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4182 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004183
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004184- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4185 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4186 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4187 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004188 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004189
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004190- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4191 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004192
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004193- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4194 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004195
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004196- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004197 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004198 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4199 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004200
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004201
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004202What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004203===============================
4204
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004205*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4206
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004207Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004208--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004209
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004210- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4211 with a custom metaclass.
4212
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004213Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004214-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004215
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004216- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4217 are proxies.
4218
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004219Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004220-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004221
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004222- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4223 very short strings.
4224
4225- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4226 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4227 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4228 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4229 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4230
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004231Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004232-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004233
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004234- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4235 close or delete time).
4236
4237- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4238 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4239
4240- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4241
4242- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004243 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004244
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004245Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004246-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004247
4248Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004249-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004250
4251C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004252-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004253
4254New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004255-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004256
4257Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004258-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004259
4260Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004261-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004262
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004263- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4264
4265- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4266 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4267
4268- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4269 deleted at process exit time.
4270
4271- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4272 in backslash.
4273
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004274Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004275----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004276
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004277- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4278 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4279 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4280
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004281
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004282What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004283===========================
4284
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004285*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4286
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004287Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004288--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004289
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004290- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4291 been extensively updated. See
4292
4293 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4294
4295 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4296
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004297- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4298 deleted!
4299
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004300- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4301 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4302 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4303 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4304 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4305
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004306- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4307
4308 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4309 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4310
4311 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4312 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4313 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4314 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4315 supported anyway.
4316
4317 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4318 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4319
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004320- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4321 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4322 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4323 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4324 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004325
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004326- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4327 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4328 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4329
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004330Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004331-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004332
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004333- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4334 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4335 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4336 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4337 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4338 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004339 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4340 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4341 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4342 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004343
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004344- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4345 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4346 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4347
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004348Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004349-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004350
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004351- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4352
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004353Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004354-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004355
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004356- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4357 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4358 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4359 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4360 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4361 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4362
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004363- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4364
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004365- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4366
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004367- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4368
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004369- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4370 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4371 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4372
4373- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4374
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004375Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004376-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004377
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004378- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4379 off a search on Google.
4380
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004381Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004382-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004383
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004384- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4385 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4386 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4387 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4388 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4389 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4390 other platforms should do likewise.
4391
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004392- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4393 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4394 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4395
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004396C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004397-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004398
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004399- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4400 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4401 producing key-value pairs.
4402
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004403- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004404 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004405 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4406 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4407 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4408 previously went unchallenged.
4409
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004410New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004411-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004412
4413Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004414-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004415
4416Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004417-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004418
4419Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004420----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004421
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004422- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4423 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004424
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004425- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4426 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4427 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4428 home.
4429
4430
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004431What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004432===========================
4433
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004434*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4435
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004436Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004437--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004438
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004439- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4440 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004441
4442 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004443 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004444
4445 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4446 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004447 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004448 This needs to be documented.
4449
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004450- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4451 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4452
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004453- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4454 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4455 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4456
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004457- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4458 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4459
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004460- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4461 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4462 class forbids it).
4463
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004464- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4465 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4466 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4467
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004468- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4469
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004470Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004471-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004472
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004473- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4474 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004475 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004476
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004477- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4478 (like 1 + '').
4479
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004480Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004481-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004482
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004483- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4484 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4485 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4486 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004487 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004488 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4489
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004490- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4491 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4492 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4493 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4494
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004495- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4496 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004497 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4498 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4499 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004500
4501- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4502 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004503
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004504- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4505 bytes on its input.
4506
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004507Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004508-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004509
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004510- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004511 convenience function.
4512
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004513- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4514 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4515 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004516 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4517 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4518 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4519 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4520 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4521 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004522
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004523- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4524 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4525 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4526 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4527
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004528- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4529 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4530 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4531
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004532- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4533 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4534 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4535 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4536
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004537- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4538 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004539 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004540 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4541 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4542 new -l and -e options.
4543
4544- statcache is now deprecated.
4545
4546- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4547 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004548 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004549 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4550 time properly taken into account.
4551
4552- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4553 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4554 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4555 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4556
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004557Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004558-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004559
4560Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004561-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004562
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004563- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4564 is built with libdb3 if available.
4565
4566- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4567
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004568C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004569-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004570
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004571- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4572 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4573 PySequence_Size().
4574
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004575- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4576
4577- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4578 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4579 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4580
4581- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4582 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4583
4584- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4585 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4586
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004587New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004588-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004589
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004590- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4591 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4592
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004593- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4594 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4595
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004596- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4597
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004598Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004599-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004600
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004601- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4602 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4603
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004604Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004605-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004606
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004607Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004608----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004609
4610- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4611 removed completely in the next release.
4612
4613- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4614 OSX.
4615
4616- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4617 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4618
4619- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4620
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004621
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004622What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004623===========================
4624
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004625*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4626
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004627Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004628--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004629
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004630- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004631 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004632 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004633 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4634 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004635 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4636 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004637 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4638 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004639
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004640- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4641 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4642
4643- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4644 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4645
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004646Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004647-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004648
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004649- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4650 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4651 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4652 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4653 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4654 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4655 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4656 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4657
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004658- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4659 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4660 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4661 example).
4662
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004663- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004664 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004665 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004666 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004667
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004668- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4669 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4670 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004671 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004672
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004673- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4674 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4675 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4676 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4677 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4678 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4679
4680 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4681
4682 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4683
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004684Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004685-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004686
4687- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4688
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004689- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4690
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004691- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4692 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004693
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004694- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4695 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4696 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4697 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4698 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4699 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004700 attributes.
4701
4702- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4703 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4704 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004705
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004706- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4707 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4708 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004709
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004710- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4711 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4712 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004713 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4714 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4715
4716- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4717 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004718
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004719Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004720-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004721
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004722- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4723 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4724
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004725- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4726 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4727 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4728 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4729
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004730- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4731 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4732 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4733 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4734
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004735 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4736 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4737 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4738 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4739 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4740 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4741 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4742 without losing information).
4743
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004744- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004745 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4746 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4747 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4748 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4749 module).
4750
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004751 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004752 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4753 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4754 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4755 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004756
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004757- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004758 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4759 encoding.
4760
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004761- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4762 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4763
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004764- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004765 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4766
4767- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4768 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4769 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4770 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4771
4772- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4773
4774- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4775 ON, and OFF.
4776
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004777- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4778 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4779
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004780Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004781-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004782
4783- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4784 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4785 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004786
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004787- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4788 been added: -X and -E.
4789
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004790Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004791-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004792
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004793- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4794 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4795
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004796C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004797-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004798
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004799- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4800 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4801 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4802 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4803 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4804
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004805- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4806 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4807 as long) arguments.
4808
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004809- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4810 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4811 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4812 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4813 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4814 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4815
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004816- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4817 input.
4818
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004819New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004820-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004821
4822Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004823-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004824
4825Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004826-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004827
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004828- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4829 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4830 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4831
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004832- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4833 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4834 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004835 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004836
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004837 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4838 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4839 import signal
4840 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004841
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004842 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004843 while 1:
4844 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004845 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004846 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4847 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4848 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4849 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004850
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004851
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004852What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4853===========================
4854
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004855*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4856
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004857Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004858--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004859
4860- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4861 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4862 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4863
4864- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4865 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4866 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4867 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4868 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4869 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4870 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004871
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004872- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004873 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004874 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4875 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4876 associate a docstring with a property.
4877
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004878- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4879 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4880 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4881 other built-in object types.
4882
4883- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4884 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4885 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4886 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4887 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4888
4889- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4890 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4891
4892- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4893 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004894 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004895 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4896 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4897 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4898 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4899 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4900
4901- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4902 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4903 class.
4904
4905- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4906 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4907 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4908 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4909
4910- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4911 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4912 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4913 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4914
4915- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4916 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4917
4918- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4919 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4920 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4921 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4922 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004923 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004924 with the same value as s.
4925
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004926- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4927
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004928Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004929----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004930
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004931- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4932
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004933- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4934 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4935 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4936 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4937 objects.
4938
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004939- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4940 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004941 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4942 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4943
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004944- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4945 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4946 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4947
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004948Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004949-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004950
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004951- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4952 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4953 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4954 by the instances.
4955
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004956- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4957 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4958 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4959
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004960- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4961 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4962 before the entire comparison is complete.
4963
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004964- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4965 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4966 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4967
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004968- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4969 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4970 getwriter().
4971
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004972- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4973 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4974
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004975- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004976 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4977 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4978
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004979- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4980 iterable object.
4981
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004982- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4983 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004984
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004985- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4986 authentication.
4987
4988- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4989 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004990
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004991- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004992 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4993 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4994 a sample driver.)
4995
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004996Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004997-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004998
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004999- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5000 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5001 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5002 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5003 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5004 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5005 kernel has large file support.
5006
5007- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5008 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5009 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5010 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5011 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5012
5013- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5014 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5015 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5016
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005017C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005018-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005019
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005020- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5021 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5022
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005023New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005024-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005025
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005026- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5027 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5028
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005029Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005030-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005031
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005032- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5033 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5034 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5035 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5036 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5037
5038- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5039 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5040 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5041 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5042
5043- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5044 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5045
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005046Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005047-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005048
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005049- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005050 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5051 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005052
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005053
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005054What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5055===========================
5056
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005057*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5058
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005059Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005060----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005061
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005062- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5063 big to represent as a C double.
5064
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005065- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5066 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5067 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5068 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5069 restriction).
5070
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005071- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5072 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5073 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5074 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5075 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5076
5077 >>> dir([])
5078 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5079 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5080 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5081 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5082 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5083 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5084 'reverse', 'sort']
5085
5086 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5087
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005088- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005089 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5090 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5091 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5092 OverflowError exception.
5093
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005094- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005095 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005096 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5097 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5098 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5099 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5100 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005101 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005102 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5103 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5104
5105 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5106 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5107 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5108 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005109
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005110- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005111 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5112 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5113 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5114 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5115 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5116 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5117 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5118 once it is created.
5119
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005120- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5121 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5122 (key, value) pairs.
5123
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005124- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005125 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5126 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5127
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005128- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5129 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5130 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5131 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5132 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005133
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005134- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005135 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5136 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5137
5138 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5139
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005140- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005141 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5142
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005143Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005144-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005145
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005146- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005147 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5148 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005149
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005150- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5151 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5152 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5153 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5154 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5155 in this area anymore).
5156
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005157- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5158 threading.Timer.
5159
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005160- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5161 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5162
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005163- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005164 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5165
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005166- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005167 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5168 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5169 converted to Python longs.
5170
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005171- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005172 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5173
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005174- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5175 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5176 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5177
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005178Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005179-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005180
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005181- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5182 division operators as per PEP 238.
5183
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005184Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005185-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005186
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005187- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5188 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5189 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5190 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5191
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005192C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005193-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005194
5195- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005196
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005197- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5198 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005199 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005200
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005201 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5202 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005203 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005204 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005205
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005206- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005207 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5208 module:
5209
5210 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005211
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005212 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5213 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005214
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005215 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5216 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005217
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005218 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5219
5220 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5221
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005222- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005223 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5224 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5225 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005226
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005227New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005228-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005229
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005230- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5231 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5232 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5233 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5234 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005235
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005236Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005237-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005238
5239Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005240-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005241
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005242- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5243 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5244 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5245 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005246 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5247 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5248 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5249 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5250 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005251
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005252- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005253 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5254
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005255
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005256What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5257===========================
5258
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005259*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5260
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005261Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005262-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005263
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005264- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5265 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5266
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005267- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5268 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5269 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005270
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005271- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5272 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5273 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5274 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005275
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005276- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5277
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005278- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005279
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005280Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005281-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005282
5283- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005284 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005285 the module docstring for details.
5286
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005287Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005288-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005289
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005290- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005291 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5292 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5293 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005294
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005295- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5296 Nick Mathewson.
5297
5298Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005299----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005300
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005301- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5302 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5303 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5304 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5305 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5306 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5307 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5308 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5309
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005310- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5311 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5312 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5313 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5314
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005315- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5316 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5317 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5318 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5319 come a long way).
5320
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005321- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5322 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5323 write filters for these warnings).
5324
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005325- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5326 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5327 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5328 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5329 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5330
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005331- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5332 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5333 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5334 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5335 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5336 older distribution.
5337
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005338Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005339-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005340
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005341- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5342 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005343 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005344
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005345- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5346 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5347 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5348
5349- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5350
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005351- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5352
5353- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5354
5355- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5356
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005357- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005358
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005359- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5360
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005361New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005362-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005363
5364C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005365-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005366
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005367- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5368 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5369 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5370 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5371 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5372 against buffer overruns.
5373
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005374- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005375 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5376 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005377 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5378 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5379 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5380
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005381- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5382 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5383 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5384 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5385 deprecated.
5386
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005387Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005388-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005389
5390- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5391 relevant is found.
5392
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005393
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005394What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005395===========================
5396
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005397*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5398
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005399Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005400----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005401
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005402- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5403 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5404 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5405 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5406 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5407 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5408 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5409 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005410 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005411 repaired.
5412
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005413- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005414 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005415 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5416 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5417 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5418 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5419 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5420 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5421 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5422 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5423
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005424- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5425 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5426 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5427 leading BMO character).
5428
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005429- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5430 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5431 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5432
5433 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5434 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5435 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005436
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005437 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5438 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5439 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5440 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5441 for various simple to use conversions.
5442
5443 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5444 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5445
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005446 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5447 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5448 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5449 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5450 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5451 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5452 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5453 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5454 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5455 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5456 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5457 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5458 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5459 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5460 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005461
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005462- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5463 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5464 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005465 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005466 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005467
5468 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005469 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5470 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5471 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5472 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5473 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005474 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5475 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005476
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005477 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5478 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5479 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005480 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005481
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005482- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5483 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5484 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5485 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5486 floating arithmetic,
5487
5488 x = 9007199254740992.0
5489 print long(x)
5490
5491 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5492 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5493 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5494 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5495 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5496 functions are of good quality).
5497
5498 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5499 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5500 algorithms to break.
5501
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005502- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5503 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5504 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5505 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5506 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5507 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5508 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5509 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5510 order.
5511
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005512- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5513 operation along the most common code paths.
5514
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005515- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5516 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5517
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005518- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5519 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5520 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5521 {}.update(UserDict())
5522
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005523- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5524 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5525 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5526 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5527 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5528 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5529 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5530 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5531
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005532- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005533 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005534
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005535 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005536 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5537 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005538 join() method of strings
5539 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005540 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5541 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005542 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005543 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005544
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005545- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5546 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5547
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005548- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5549 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5550
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005551- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5552 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5553 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5554 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5555
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005556- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5557 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005558 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005559 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5560 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005561
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005562- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5563
5564
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005565Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005566-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005567
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005568- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005569 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005570 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5571 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5572
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005573- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5574 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5575
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005576- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5577 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5578 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5579 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5580
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005581- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5582 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5583 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5584
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005585- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5586
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005587- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5588
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005589- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5590 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5591 that are still imported into string.py).
5592
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005593- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5594
5595- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5596 Now it does.
5597
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005598- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5599
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005600- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5601 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5602 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5603 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5604 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005605 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5606 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005607
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005608- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5609 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5610 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5611 'help(object)'.
5612
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005613Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005614-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005615
5616- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005617 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005618 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5619 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5620
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005621- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005622 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5623 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005624
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005625C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005626-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005627
5628- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5629 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005630
5631----
5632
5633**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**