blob: 4763598d3ae1e3cf552d93433ef732b84b2207bc [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
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000015- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
16 serializing floats.
17
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000018- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
19 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
20 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
21
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000022- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
23 278.
24
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000025- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
26 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
27 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
28 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
29 to the base class has been moved the prroper nb_* magic slot and out of
30 PyNumber_*().
31 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
32
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000033- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
34 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
35 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
36 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
37
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000038- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
39 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
40 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
41 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
42 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
43
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000044- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
45 disabled caused a crash.
46
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000047- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
48 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
49
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000050- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
51 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
52
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000053- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
54
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000055- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +000056 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
57 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
58 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000059
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000060- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
61
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000062- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
63 returning None.
64
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000065- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
66 ('\') with a specific error message.
67
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000068- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
69
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000070- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
71 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
72
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000073- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000074 an ferror() call.
75
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000076- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
77 list.sort().
78
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000079- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
80 (2+3) --> (5).
81
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000082- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
83
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +000084- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
85 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000086
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +000087- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
88 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
89 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
90
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000091Extension Modules
92-----------------
93
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +000094- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
95
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +000096- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
97 if available on the platform.
98
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +000099- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
100 available on the platform.
101
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000102- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
103 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
104
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000105- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
106
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000107- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
108 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
109 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
110
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000111- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
112
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000113- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
114 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
115
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000116- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
117 file size.
118
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000119- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
120
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000121- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
122 {remove_history,replace_history}
123
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000124- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
125 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000126
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000127- stat_float_times is now True.
128
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000129- array.array objects are now picklable.
130
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000131- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
132 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
133
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000134- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
135 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
136 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
137
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000138- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
139 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000140
141Library
142-------
143
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000144- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
145 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
146 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
147 terminates by raising StopIteration.
148
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000149- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
150
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000151- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
152 component of the path.
153
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000154- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
155 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
156 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
157 class at all.
158
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000159- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
160 files to PyPI.
161
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000162- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
163 them to PyPI.
164
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000165- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
166 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
167 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
168 work as expected.
169
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000170- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
171 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
172
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000173- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
174 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
175
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000176- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
177
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000178- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
179 to build.
180
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000181- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
182 symbolic links on Windows.
183
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000184- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
185 profile.py if available.
186
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000187- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
188
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000189- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
190 in LWPCookieJar.
191
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000192- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
193
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000194- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
195
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000196- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
197
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000198- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
199
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000200- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
201
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000202- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
203
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000204- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
205
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000206- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
207
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000208- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
209 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
210 be exploited in various ways.
211
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000212- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
213
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000214- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
215
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000216- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
217
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000218- Enhancements to the csv module:
219
220 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
221 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
222 PEP 305.
223 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
224 reporting.
225 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
226 dictates.
227 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000228 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000229 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000230 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
231 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000232 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
233 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000234 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000235 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
236 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
237 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
238 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
239 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
240 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
241 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
242 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
243 without first creating a dialect class.
244 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
245 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
246 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000247 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000248 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
249 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000250 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
251 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
252 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
253 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000254 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
255 This has been fixed.
256
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000257- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
258 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
259 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
260 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
261
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000262- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
263
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000264- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
265 (Bug #951915).
266
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000267- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
268 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
269 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
270 encoding alias table
271
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000272- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
273
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000274- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
275 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
276
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000277- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
278
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000279- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
280
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000281- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
282
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000283- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
284
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000285- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
286
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000287- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
288 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
289 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
290
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000291- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000292 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000293
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000294- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
295 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
296 tokenizer with very long source lines.
297
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000298- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
299 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
300
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000301- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
302 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000303
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000304- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
305 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
306
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000307- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
308 correctly.
309
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000310- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
311 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
312 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
313 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
314 between two lines.
315
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000316
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000317Build
318-----
319
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000320- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
321 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
322 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000323 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000324
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000325- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
326 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
327 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
328
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000329- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
330
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000331- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
332 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
333
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000334- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
335 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
336 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
337 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
338 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
339 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
340 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
341 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
342
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000343- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
344 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
345 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
346 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
347
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000348
349C API
350-----
351
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000352- Removed PyRange_New().
353
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000354
355Tests
356-----
357
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000358- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000359
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000360
361Documentation
362-------------
363
364- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
365 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
366 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
367
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000368Mac
369---
370
371
372
373Tools/Demos
374-----------
375
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000376- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000377
378
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000379What's New in Python 2.4 final?
380===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000381
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000382*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000383
384Core and builtins
385-----------------
386
387- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
388 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
389 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
390
391
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000392What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
393==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000394
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000395*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000396
397Core and builtins
398-----------------
399
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000400- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
401 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
402 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
403
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000404
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000405Library
406-------
407
408- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
409 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
410 raised is re-raised.
411
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000412- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
413 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
414
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000415- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
416 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
417 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
418 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
419 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
420 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
421 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
422 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
423 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
424 by the slice are recomputed now.
425
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000426- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000427
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000428Build
429-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000430
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000431- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
432 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
433 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000434
435C API
436-----
437
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000438- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
439
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000440
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000441What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
442================================
443
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000444*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000445
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000446License
447-------
448
449The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
450is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
451changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
452Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
453intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
454durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
455the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
456License::
457
458 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
459
460says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
461to Python 2.1.1.
462
463The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
464License Version 2.
465
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000466Core and builtins
467-----------------
468
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000469- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
470 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
471 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
472 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
473 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
474 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
475 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
476 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
477 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
478 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
479
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000480- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000481
482Extension Modules
483-----------------
484
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000485- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
486 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
487 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
488 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000489
490Library
491-------
492
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000493- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
494 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
495 returned.
496
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000497- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
498
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000499- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
500 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
501
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000502- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
503
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000504- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
505 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000506
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000507- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
508
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000509- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
510
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000511- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000512 the source code is updated and reloaded.
513
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000514Build
515-----
516
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000517- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000518
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000519What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
520================================
521
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000522*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000523
524Core and builtins
525-----------------
526
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000527- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000528 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
529
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000530- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
531 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
532 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
533 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
534
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000535- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
536 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
537
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000538- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
539 constant.
540
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000541- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
542 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
543 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
544 large), and to anomalies such as
545 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
546 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
547 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
548 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000549
550Extension modules
551-----------------
552
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000553- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
554 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000555 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
556 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
557 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000558
559Library
560-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000561
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000562- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000563 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000564 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
565 --swig-cpp.
566
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000567- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
568 it is set.
569
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000570- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000571
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000572- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
573 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
574 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
575 Closes bug #1039270.
576
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000577- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000578
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000579 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000580 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
581 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
582 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
583 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
584 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
585 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
586 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
587 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
588 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
589 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
590 + Updates to documentation.
591
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000592- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
593 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
594 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
595 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
596
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000597- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000598
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000599- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
600 applications should use the getmember function.
601
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000602- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
603
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000604- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
605 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
606 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
607 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
608 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
609 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
610 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
611 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
612 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
613
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000614- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
615 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000616 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000617
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000618- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
619 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
620 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
621 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
622 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
623 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
624 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
625 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000626
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000627- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
628 the new public features (of which there are many).
629
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000630- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000631 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
632 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
633 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
634 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000635 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000636
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000637- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
638
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000639- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
640 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
641 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
642 options.
643
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000644- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
645 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
646 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
647 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
648 conditions under which non-string values work.
649
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000650Build
651-----
652
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000653- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
654 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
655 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
656
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000657- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
658 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
659 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
660 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
661 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000662
663C API
664-----
665
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000666- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
667 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
668
669- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
670
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000671- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
672 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
673 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
674 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
675 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
676 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
677 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
678 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
679 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
680
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000681- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
682
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000683- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
684 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
685 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000686
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000687Tests
688-----
689
690- test__locale ported to unittest
691
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000692Mac
693---
694
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000695- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
696 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
697 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000698
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000699Tools/Demos
700-----------
701
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000702- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
703 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
704 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
705 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
706 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000707
708
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000709What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
710=================================
711
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000712*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000713
714Core and builtins
715-----------------
716
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000717- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000718 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
719
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000720- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
721 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
722 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
723 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
724 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
725 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
726 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
727 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000728 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
729 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
730 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
731 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
732 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000733
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000734- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
735 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
736 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
737 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
738 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
739
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000740- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
741
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000742- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
743 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
744
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000745- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
746 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
747 modified the list.
748
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000749- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
750 functions is now writable.
751
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000752- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
753 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
754 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
755 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
756
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000757- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
758 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
759 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
760 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
761 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000762
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000763- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
764 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
765
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000766Extension modules
767-----------------
768
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000769- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
770
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000771- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
772 data.
773
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000774- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
775 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
776 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
777 supposed to have been truncated away.
778
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000779- Added socket.socketpair().
780
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000781- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
782 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
783
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000784- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000785 versions of Python, have now been removed.
786
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000787Library
788-------
789
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000790- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000791 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000792
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000793- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
794 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
795
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000796- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
797 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
798
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000799- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
800
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000801- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
802 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000803
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000804- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
805 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
806
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000807- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
808
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000809- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
810
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000811- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
812
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000813- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
814 Percivall.
815
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000816- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
817 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
818
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000819- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
820 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
821 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000822 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000823
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000824- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
825 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
826 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
827 and exponent.
828
829- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
830
831- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
832 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
833 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
834
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000835- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
836 to the readline module.
837
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000838- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000839 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
840 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000841
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000842- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
843 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
844 contains symlinks.
845
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000846- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
847 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
848
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000849- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
850 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
851 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
852
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000853- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
854 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
855 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
856 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
857 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
858 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
859 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
860 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
861 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
862 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
863 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
864 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
865 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
866
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000867- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
868
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000869Tools/Demos
870-----------
871
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000872- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
873 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
874
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000875- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
876
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000877Build
878-----
879
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000880- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
881 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
882 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
883 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
884 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
885 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
886 plans to do so.
887
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000888- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
889 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
890
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000891- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
892 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
893
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000894- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
895 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
896
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000897- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
898 GNU/k*BSD systems.
899
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000900- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
901 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
902
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000903C API
904-----
905
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000906..
907
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000908Documentation
909-------------
910
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000911- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
912 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
913
914- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
915 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
916 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000917
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000918New platforms
919-------------
920
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000921- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
922
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000923Tests
924-----
925
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000926..
927
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000928Windows
929-------
930
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000931- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
932 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
933 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
934 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
935 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
936 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
937 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
938 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
939 the problem.
940
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000941Mac
942---
943
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000944..
945
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000946
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000947What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
948=================================
949
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000950*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000951
952Core and builtins
953-----------------
954
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000955- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
956 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
957 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
958 sensitive code.
959
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000960- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000961 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000962
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000963 @staticmethod
964 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000965
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000966 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000967
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000968- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
969 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
970 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
971 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
972 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
973 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
974 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
975 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
976 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
977 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
978 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
979
980 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
981 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
982 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
983 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
984 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
985 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
986 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
987
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000988- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
989 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
990
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000991- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000992 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000993
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000994- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000995 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000996 which was missing for no apparent reason.
997
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000998- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000999 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1000 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1001
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001002- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1003 types that support garbage collection.
1004
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001005- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1006
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001007- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1008 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1009 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1010 Jython.
1011
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001012- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1013
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001014- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1015 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1016
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001017- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1018 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1019 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001020
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001021- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1022 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1023 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1024
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001025Extension modules
1026-----------------
1027
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001028- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1029
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001030Library
1031-------
1032
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001033- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1034 TIS-620
1035
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001036- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1037 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1038 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1039 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1040 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1041 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1042 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1043 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1044 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1045 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1046
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001047- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1048
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001049- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1050 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1051 same as when the argument is omitted).
1052 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1053
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001054- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1055
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001056- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1057 schemes are offered.
1058
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001059- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1060
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001061- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1062 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1063 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1064
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001065- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1066
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001067- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1068 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1069
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001070- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1071 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1072 when dummy_threading is being used.
1073
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001074- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1075 from a tarfile.
1076
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001077- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001078 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001079
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001080- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1081 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1082 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1083 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1084
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001085- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1086 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1087
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001088- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1089 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1090 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1091 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1092 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1093 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1094 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1095 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1096 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1097 by some other method in progress).
1098
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001099- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1100 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1101 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001102
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001103- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1104
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001105- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1106 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1107 AM Kuchling.
1108
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001109- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1110 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1111 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1112
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001113- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1114 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1115 instead of unsigned.
1116
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001117- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001118 no longer part of the public API.
1119
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001120- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1121 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1122 string methods of the same name).
1123
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001124- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001125 SF patch 945642.
1126
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001127- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1128
1129 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1130
1131 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1132 DocTestSuites.
1133
1134- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1135 that provide thread-local data.
1136
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001137- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1138 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1139
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001140- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1141
1142- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1143 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1144 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1145
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001146- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1147
1148 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1149 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1150 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001151
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001152 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1153 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1154 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1155 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1156
1157 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1158 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1159
1160 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1161 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1162 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1163 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1164
1165 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1166 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1167 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1168 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1169 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1170
1171 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1172 wrapping help output.
1173
1174 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1175 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1176 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001177
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001178C API
1179-----
1180
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001181- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1182 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1183 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1184 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1185 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1186 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1187 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1188 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1189 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1190 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1191 its visible semantics have not changed.
1192
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001193- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1194 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1195
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001196Documentation
1197-------------
1198
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001199- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001200
1201 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001202 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001203
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001204 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001205
1206 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1207
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001208- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001209
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001210Tests
1211-----
1212
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001213- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001214 platforms that use the Makefile.
1215
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001216- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1217 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1218 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1219
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001220
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001221What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1222=================================
1223
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001224*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001225
1226Core and builtins
1227-----------------
1228
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001229- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1230 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1231 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1232 objects now (one object instead of three).
1233
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001234- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1235 Windows DLLs.
1236
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001237- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1238 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001239
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001240- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1241 a new .pyc magic.
1242
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001243- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1244 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1245 be there.
1246
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001247- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1248 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1249 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1250
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001251- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1252 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1253 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1254
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001255- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1256
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001257- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1258 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1259 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001260
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001261- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1262 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1263
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001264- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1265
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001266- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001267 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001268
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001269- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1270
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001271- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1272
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001273- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1274 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1275
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001276- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1277 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1278 Fixes bug #858016 .
1279
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001280- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1281 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1282 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1283
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001284- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1285 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1286 improves their performance (about 35%).
1287
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001288- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1289 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1290 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1291
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001292- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1293 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1294 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1295 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1296
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001297- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1298 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001299 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001300 length is not known).
1301
1302- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1303 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001304 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1305 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001306 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1307
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001308- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1309 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1310
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001311- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1312 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1313 keyword arguments.
1314
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001315- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1316 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1317 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1318
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001319- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1320 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1321 cases.
1322
1323- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1324 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1325 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1326 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1327 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1328 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1329 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1330 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1331 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1332 a release build.
1333
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001334- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1335 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1336
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001337- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001338 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001339
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001340- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1341 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1342 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1343 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1344 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1345 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1346 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1347 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1348 destroyed.
1349
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001350- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1351 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1352 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1353 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1354 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1355 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1356 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1357 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1358
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001359- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1360 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1361 character other than a space.
1362
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001363- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1364 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1365 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1366 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1367 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1368 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1369 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1370 attributes with the same name.
1371
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001372- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1373 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1374 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1375 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1376 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1377 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1378 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1379 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1380 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1381 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1382 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1383 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1384 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1385 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001386
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001387- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1388 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1389 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1390 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1391 This has been repaired.
1392
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001393- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1394
1395- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1396
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001397- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1398 over a sequence.
1399
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001400- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001401 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001402
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001403- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1404
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001405- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1406 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1407 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1408 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1409 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1410 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1411 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1412 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1413
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001414- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1415 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1416 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1417
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001418- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1419 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1420 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1421 freelist.
1422
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001423- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1424 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1425
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001426- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1427 number.
1428
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001429- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1430 a TypeError exception.
1431
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001432- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1433 820195.
1434
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001435- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1436 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1437 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1438
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001439- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001440 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1441 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001442
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001443- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1444 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1445 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1446
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001447- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1448 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001449 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001450
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001451- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001452 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1453 the first call.
1454
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001455
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001456Extension modules
1457-----------------
1458
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001459- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1460 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1461
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001462- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1463 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1464 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1465 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1466 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1467 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1468 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001469
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001470- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1471
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001472- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1473
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001474- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1475 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1476
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001477- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1478 fewer false positives.
1479
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001480- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1481 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1482
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001483- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001484 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1485
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001486- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001487 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001488 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001489 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1490 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001491
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001492- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1493 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1494 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1495 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1496
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001497- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1498 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1499 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1500 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1501 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1502 #897625.
1503
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001504- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1505 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1506
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001507- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1508 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1509 and pops on either side of the deque.
1510
1511- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1512 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1513
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001514- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1515 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1516 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1517 other functions that expect a function argument.
1518
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001519- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1520
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001521- os.getsid was added.
1522
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001523- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1524 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1525 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1526
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001527- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1528
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001529- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1530
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001531- readline.clear_history was added.
1532
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001533- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1534
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001535- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1536
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001537- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1538
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001539- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1540
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001541- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1542
1543- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1544
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001545- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1546
1547- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1548
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001549- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1550 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1551 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1552
1553- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1554 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1555 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1556 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1557 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1558 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1559 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1560
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001561- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1562 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1563 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1564 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001565
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001566- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001567 iterators from a single iterable.
1568
1569- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1570 of raising a TypeError exception.
1571
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001572- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1573 as parameter.
1574
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001575Library
1576-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001577
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001578- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1579 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1580 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001581
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001582- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1583 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1584 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001585
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001586- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001587
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001588- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1589 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001590
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001591- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1592 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1593
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001594- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1595
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001596- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001597 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001598
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001599- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001600 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001601
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001602- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1603
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001604- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1605 on cygwin and mingw32.
1606
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001607- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1608
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001609- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1610 module.
1611
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001612- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1613 installation scheme for all platforms.
1614
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001615- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001616 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001617
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001618- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1619 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1620 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1621
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001622- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1623 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1624 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1625
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001626- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1627
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001628- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1629
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001630- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1631 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1632
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001633- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1634 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1635 type pattern with the same value exists.
1636
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001637- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1638 when run from the command prompt).
1639
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001640- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1641 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1642
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001643- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1644 default sort).
1645
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001646- Added global runctx function to profile module
1647
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001648- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1649
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001650- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1651
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001652- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1653
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001654- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001655 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1656 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1657 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1658 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1659 accordingly.
1660
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001661- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1662 decoding standards.
1663
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001664- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1665 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1666 called for all requests.
1667
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001668- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1669 they are passed to the compiler.
1670
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001671- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1672 indent, width and depth.
1673
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001674- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1675 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1676
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001677- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1678 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1679
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001680- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1681
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001682- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1683
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001684- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1685
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001686- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1687 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1688
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001689- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001690 for better performance.
1691
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001692- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001693
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001694- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1695 a string).
1696
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001697- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1698
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001699- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1700
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001701- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1702
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001703- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1704
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001705- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1706 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1707 list of fieldnames.
1708
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001709- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1710 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1711
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001712- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1713
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001714- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1715 empty lists.
1716
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001717- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1718 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1719 and shelves.
1720
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001721- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1722 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1723
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001724- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001725 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1726 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001727
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001728- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1729 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001730 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001731
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001732- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001733 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1734 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1735
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001736- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1737 and removed in Py2.4.
1738
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001739- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1740
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001741- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1742
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001743Tools/Demos
1744-----------
1745
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001746- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1747 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1748
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001749- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1750
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001751- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1752 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1753 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1754 destination in situations where both files are given.
1755
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001756- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1757 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1758 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1759 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1760
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001761- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1762
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001763- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1764 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1765 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1766 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1767 now.
1768
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001769- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1770 in effect
1771
1772- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1773 C-c C-h
1774
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001775- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1776 -d option was given.
1777
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001778Build
1779-----
1780
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001781- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1782 build under OS X.
1783
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001784- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1785 --enable-profiling.
1786
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001787- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1788 is configured --with-tsc.
1789
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001790- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1791 on AMD64.
1792
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001793- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1794 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1795
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001796- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1797 removed.
1798
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001799- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1800 supported (see PEP 11).
1801
1802- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1803
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001804- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1805
1806- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1807 (see PEP 11).
1808
1809- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1810 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1811
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001812C API
1813-----
1814
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001815- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1816 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1817 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1818
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001819- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1820 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1821 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1822 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1823
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001824- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1825 generator objects.
1826
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001827- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1828 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001829 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1830 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001831
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001832- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1833 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1834
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001835- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1836 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1837 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1838 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1839 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1840
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001841- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1842 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1843 about 10% faster.
1844
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001845- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1846 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1847
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001848- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1849 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1850 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1851 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1852
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001853Windows
1854-------
1855
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001856- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1857 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1858 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1859 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1860
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001861- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1862 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1863 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1864
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001865
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001866What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1867===============================
1868
1869*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1870
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001871IDLE
1872----
1873
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001874- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1875 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1876 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1877 context-menu actions.
1878
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001879- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1880 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1881 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1882 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1883 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1884 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1885 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1886 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1887 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1888
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001889
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001890What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1891=============================================
1892
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001893*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001894
1895Core and builtins
1896-----------------
1897
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001898- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001899 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001900 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1901
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001902Extension modules
1903-----------------
1904
1905- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1906 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1907 than once. This has been fixed.
1908
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001909- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1910 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1911 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1912 call.
1913
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001914- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1915
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001916Library
1917-------
1918
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001919- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1920 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1921
1922- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1923 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1924 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1925 restored.
1926
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001927IDLE
1928----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001929
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001930- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001931
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001932Build
1933-----
1934
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001935- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1936 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1937
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001938C API
1939-----
1940
1941Windows
1942-------
1943
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001944- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1945 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1946
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001947- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1948
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001949Mac
1950---
1951
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001952- Various fixes to pimp.
1953
1954- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1955
1956- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1957 more problems than it solves.
1958
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001959
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001960What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1961=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001962
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001963*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1964
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001965Core and builtins
1966-----------------
1967
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001968- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1969 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1970
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001971- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1972 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001973 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001974
1975- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1976 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1977 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001978 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001979
1980- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1981 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001982
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001983- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1984 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1985 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1986
1987- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001988 770247.
1989
1990- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001991
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001992Extension modules
1993-----------------
1994
1995- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1996 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1997
1998- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1999
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002000- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2001
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002002- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2003 contained within the _strptime module.
2004
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002005- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2006 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2007
2008- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002009 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2010
2011- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2012 the find_class attribute, if present.
2013
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002014- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002015
2016 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2017 (SF bug 763298).
2018
2019 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002020 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2021 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2022 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002023
2024 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2025
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002026Library
2027-------
2028
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002029- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2030
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002031- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2032 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2033 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2034 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2035 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2036 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2037 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2038 or Tester().
2039
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002040- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2041 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2042 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2043 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2044 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2045 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2046 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2047 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2048 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002049
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002050 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002051
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002052- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2053 weren't before was an oversight.
2054
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002055- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2056 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2057
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002058- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2059 when there are no lines.
2060
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002061- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2062 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2063
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002064- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2065 to child processes.
2066
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002067- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2068
2069- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2070
2071- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2072 xmlrpclib.
2073
2074- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2075 responses.
2076
2077- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2078 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2079
2080- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2081 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2082 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2083
2084- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2085 used as patterns.
2086
2087- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2088 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2089 than Tk 8.3.
2090
2091- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2092
2093- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002094
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002095Tools/Demos
2096-----------
2097
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002098- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2099
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002100- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2101
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002102- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002103
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002104Build
2105-----
2106
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002107- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2108
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002109- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2110
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002111- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2112 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002113
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002114- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2115 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2116 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002117
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002118C API
2119-----
2120
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002121- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2122 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2123
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002124Windows
2125-------
2126
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002127- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2128 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2129 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2130 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2131 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2132 Python exception ::
2133
2134 thread.error: can't start new thread
2135
2136 is raised now.
2137
2138- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2139 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2140 instead of from DLL teardown.
2141
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002142Mac
2143---
2144
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002145- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002146 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002147 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2148 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2149 the executable in the bundle.
2150
2151- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002152
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002153- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2154
2155- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2156 on Panther.
2157
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002158What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2159================================
2160
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002161*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002162
2163Core and builtins
2164-----------------
2165
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002166- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2167 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2168 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2169 with the -i option.
2170
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002171- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2172 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2173
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002174- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2175 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2176
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002177- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2178 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2179 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2180 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2181 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2182 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2183 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2184 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2185 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2186 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2187 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2188 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2189 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002190
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002191- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2192 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2193 embedded in a lambda expression.
2194
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002195- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2196 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2197 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2198 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2199 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2200
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002201- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2202 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2203 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2204
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002205- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2206 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2207
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002208- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2209 It's writable again.
2210
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002211- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2212 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2213 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002214 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002215
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002216- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2217 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2218 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2219
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002220Extension modules
2221-----------------
2222
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002223- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2224 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2225
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002226- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2227 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2228 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2229 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2230
2231- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2232 collection.
2233
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002234- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2235 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2236 unique within a single program run.
2237
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002238- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2239 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2240
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002241- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2242 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2243
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002244- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2245 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002246
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002247- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2248
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002249- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2250 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2251
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002252- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2253 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2254 for many BSD-derived systems.
2255
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002256
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002257Library
2258-------
2259
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002260- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2261 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2262 primary ones:
2263
2264 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2265 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2266 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2267
2268 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2269 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2270 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2271 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2272 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2273 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2274
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002275- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2276 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2277 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2278 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2279 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2280 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2281 argument.
2282
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002283- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2284 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2285 in the archive.
2286
2287- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2288 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2289
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002290- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2291 569574).
2292
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002293- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2294 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2295 no more.
2296
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002297- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2298 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2299 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2300 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2301 code coverage.
2302
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002303- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2304 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2305 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002306 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2307 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002308
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002309- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2310 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2311 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002312 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002313
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002314- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2315
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002316- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2317 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2318 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2319 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2320
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002321- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2322 handling.
2323
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002324- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2325 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2326
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002327- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2328 in socket.py.
2329
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002330- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2331
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002332- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2333 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2334 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2335 opener with proxy support.
2336
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002337- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2338
2339- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2340
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002341Tools/Demos
2342-----------
2343
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002344- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2345
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002346- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2347
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002348- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2349 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002350
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002351- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2352 files.
2353
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002354Build
2355-----
2356
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002357- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002358 different root directory.
2359
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002360C API
2361-----
2362
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002363- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2364 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2365 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2366 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2367 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2368 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2369 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2370 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2371 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2372 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2373
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002374- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2375 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2376 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2377 from Python.
2378
2379
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002380New platforms
2381-------------
2382
2383None this time.
2384
2385Tests
2386-----
2387
2388- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2389 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2390
2391Windows
2392-------
2393
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002394- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2395
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002396- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2397 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2398 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2399 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2400 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2401 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2402 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2403 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2404 that's what it's for.
2405
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002406Mac
2407---
2408
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002409- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2410 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2411 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2412 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002413- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2414 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2415- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002416
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002417SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2418------------------------------------
2419
2420430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2421598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2422622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2423661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2424683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2425697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2426713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2427724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2428727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2429729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2430730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2431731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2432732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2433733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2434735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2435740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2436744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2437745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2438747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2439749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2440751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2441753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2442755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2443757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2444760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2445
2446
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002447What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2448================================
2449
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002450*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002451
2452Core and builtins
2453-----------------
2454
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002455- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2456 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2457
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002458- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2459 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2460 and cannot be strings).
2461
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002462- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2463 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2464 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2465 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2466
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002467- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2468 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2469 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2470 Python itself.
2471
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002472- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2473 the referenced object, if it has one.
2474
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002475- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2476 the thread started at
2477 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2478
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002479- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2480 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2481 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2482 placed on a list index.
2483
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002484- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2485 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2486 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2487 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2488
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002489- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2490 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2491 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2492 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2493 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2494 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2495 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2496
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002497- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2498 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2499 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2500 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2501 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2502
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002503- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2504 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002505
2506- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2507 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2508 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2509 #693195.)
2510
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002511- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2512 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002513
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002514- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002515 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002516 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2517 interpreter executions, would fail.
2518
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002519- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002520 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002521 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002522
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002523Extension modules
2524-----------------
2525
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002526- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2527 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2528 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2529 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2530
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002531- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2532 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2533
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002534- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2535 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2536 and Greg Chapman.)
2537
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002538- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2539 recursively.
2540
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002541- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002542 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2543 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2544 leaks.
2545
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002546- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2547
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002548- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2549 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2550 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2551 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2552 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2553 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2554 #705836.
2555
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002556- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002557 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2558
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002559- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2560 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2561 See SF bug #692416.
2562
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002563- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2564 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2565
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002566- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2567 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2568 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002569
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002570- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002571 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2572 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2573
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002574- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2575 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2576 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2577 timeouts to work properly.
2578
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002579Library
2580-------
2581
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002582- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2583 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2584 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2585 future release.
2586
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002587- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2588 for querying platform dependent features.
2589
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002590- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002591
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002592- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2593 pickle protocol versions.
2594
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002595- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2596 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2597 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2598
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002599- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2600
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002601- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2602 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2603 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2604 modules.
2605
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002606- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2607 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2608 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2609
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002610- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2611 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2612
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002613- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2614 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2615 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2616
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002617- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002618 MS Office extensions.
2619
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002620- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2621 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2622
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002623- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2624 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2625
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002626- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2627 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2628 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2629 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2630 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2631 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2632
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002633- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2634 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2635 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002636
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002637- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2638 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2639 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2640
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002641- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2642
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002643- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2644 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2645 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2646
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002647Tools/Demos
2648-----------
2649
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002650- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2651 See the module docstring for details.
2652
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002653Build
2654-----
2655
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002656- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2657 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002658
2659C API
2660-----
2661
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002662- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2663
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002664- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2665 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2666 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2667
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002668- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2669 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002670
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002671 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2672 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2673 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002674
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002675- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002676 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2677
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002678- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2679 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2680 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002681
2682New platforms
2683-------------
2684
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002685None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002686
2687Tests
2688-----
2689
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002690- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2691 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002692
2693Windows
2694-------
2695
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002696- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2697 function.
2698
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002699- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2700 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002701
2702Mac
2703---
2704
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002705- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2706 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002707
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002708- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2709 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002710
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002711- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2712 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2713 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002714
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002715- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002716 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2717 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002718
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002719- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2720 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002721
2722
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002723What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2724=================================
2725
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002726*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002727
2728Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002729-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002730
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002731- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2732 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2733 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2734
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002735- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2736 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2737 (SF patch #664376.)
2738
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002739- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2740 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2741 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2742 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2743 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2744 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002745 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002746
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002747- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2748 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2749 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2750 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002751 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002752
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002753- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2754 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2755 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2756 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2757 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2758 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2759 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2760 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2761 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2762 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2763 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2764
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002765- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2766 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2767 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2768 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2769 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2770 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2771
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002772- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2773 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2774
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002775- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2776 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2777 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2778 case.)
2779
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002780- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2781 passed as unicode strings.
2782
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002783- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2784 See SF bug #683467.
2785
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002786- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2787 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2788
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002789- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2790
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002791- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2792
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002793- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2794 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2795 arguments.
2796
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002797- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2798 See SF bug #667147.
2799
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002800- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002801 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002802 See SF bug #676155.
2803
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002804- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002805 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002806 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2807 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2808 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2809 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2810 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2811 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002812
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002813Extension modules
2814-----------------
2815
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002816- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2817 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2818 tp_as_number pointer.
2819
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002820- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2821 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2822 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2823 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2824 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2825
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002826- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2827
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002828- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2829
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002830- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002831 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002832 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2833 patch #678531.)
2834
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002835- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2836 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2837
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002838- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2839 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2840
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002841- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2842
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002843- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2844 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2845 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2846
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002847- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2848
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002849- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2850 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2851
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002852- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002853
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002854- datetime changes:
2855
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002856 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2857
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002858 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2859 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2860 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2861 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2862 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2863 now.
2864
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002865 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002866 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2867 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002868
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002869 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002870 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002871 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2872 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2873 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2874 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002875
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002876 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2877 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2878 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002879 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2880
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002881 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2882 by a later example coded by Guido.
2883
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002884 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002885 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2886 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2887 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002888 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2889 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2890
2891 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2892 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2893 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2894 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2895 tzinfo subclass instance.
2896
2897 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2898 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2899 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2900 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2901 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2902 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2903 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2904 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002905
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002906 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2907 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2908 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2909 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2910 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002911 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2912
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002913 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002914
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002915 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2916 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2917 as a naive datetime object.
2918
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002919 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2920 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2921 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2922
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002923 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2924 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2925 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2926 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2927 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2928 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2929 comparison.
2930
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002931 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2932 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2933 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2934 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002935 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002936
2937 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002938
2939 and ::
2940
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002941 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2942
2943 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2944 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2945 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2946 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2947
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002948 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2949 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2950 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2951 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2952 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2953
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002954 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2955 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002956 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2957 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002958
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002959Library
2960-------
2961
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002962- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2963 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2964
2965- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2966 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2967 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2968 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2969 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2970 See PEP 307 for details.
2971
2972- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2973 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2974
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002975- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2976 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002977 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002978 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2979 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002980 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002981
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002982- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2983 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2984
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002985- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2986 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2987 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2988
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002989- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2990
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002991- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2992 exception.
2993
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002994- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2995 class.
2996
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002997- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2998 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2999 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3000
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003001- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3002 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3003
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003004- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003005 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3006 See SF bug #659228.
3007
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003008- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3009 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3010 See SF patch #651082.
3011
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003012- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003013
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003014- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3015 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3016
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003017- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003018 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003019
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003020- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3021 DOS paths from other platforms.
3022
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003023Tools/Demos
3024-----------
3025
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003026- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3027 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3028 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3029 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3030 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3031 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3032 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3033 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3034 example:
3035
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003036 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3037 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003038
3039 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3040
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003041
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003042Build
3043-----
3044
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003045- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3046 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3047 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003048 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3049
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003050 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3051
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003052- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3053 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3054 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3055 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3056 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3057 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3058 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3059 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3060 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3061
3062- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3063 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3064 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3065 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3066
3067- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3068 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3069
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003070C API
3071-----
3072
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003073- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3074 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003075
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003076- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3077 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3078 tp_as_number pointer.
3079
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003080- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3081 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3082 (SF #681367)
3083
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003084- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3085 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3086 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3087 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003088
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003089Tests
3090-----
3091
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003092- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003093 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3094 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3095 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3096 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3097 pydoc.)
3098
3099- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3100
3101- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003102
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003103Windows
3104-------
3105
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003106- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3107 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3108 time).
3109
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003110- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3111 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3112
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003113- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3114 release without strong cryptography.
3115
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003116- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003117 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003118
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003119- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3120 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3121
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003122Mac
3123---
3124
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003125- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3126 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003127
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003128- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3129 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3130 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003131
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003132- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3133 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003134
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003135- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3136 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3137 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3138 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003139
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003140- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003141 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3142 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3143 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003144
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003145
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003146What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003147=================================
3148
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003149*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003150
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003151Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003152--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003153
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003154- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3155
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003156- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3157 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003158 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003159 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003160 a different meaning than before.
3161
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003162- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003163 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003164 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003165
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003166- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003167 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003168 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003169
3170- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3171 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3172 and deallocation.
3173
3174- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3175 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3176
3177- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3178 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3179 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3180 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3181 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3182
3183- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3184 now detected by the garbage collector.
3185
3186- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3187 [SF bug 519621]
3188
3189- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3190 identifier.
3191
3192- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3193 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3194 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3195 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3196 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3197 [SF bug 563060]
3198
3199- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3200 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3201 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3202 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3203 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3204
3205- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3206 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3207 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3208
3209- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3210
3211- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3212 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3213 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3214 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3215 state of the slots would be lost.)
3216
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003217Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003218-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003219
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003220- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003221 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3222 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3223 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3224 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003225 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3226 Jython 2.1.
3227
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003228- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003229 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003230 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3231 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3232 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3233 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3234 these, see PEP 302.
3235
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003236- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3237 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3238 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3239
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003240- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3241 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3242 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3243
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003244- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3245 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3246 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3247
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003248- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3249 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3250 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3251 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3252 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3253 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3254 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3255 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3256 releases or implementations.
3257
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003258- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003259 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3260 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003261
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003262- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3263 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3264
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003265- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3266 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3267 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3268
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003269- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3270 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3271
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003272- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3273 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003274 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3275 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003276
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003277- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3278 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3279 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3280 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3281 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3282
3283 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3284 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3285 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3286 pattern.
3287
3288 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3289 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3290 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3291 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3292
3293 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3294 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3295 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3296 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3297 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3298 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3299
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003300- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3301 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3302 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3303 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3304 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3305 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3306 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3307 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003308
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003309- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3310 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3311 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3312 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3313 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003314 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3315 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3316 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3317 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3318 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3319 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3320 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003321
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003322- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3323 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3324
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003325- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3326 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3327 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3328 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3329 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3330 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3331 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3332 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3333 to Zack Weinberg!
3334
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003335- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3336 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3337 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3338 type. This has been fixed now.
3339
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003340- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3341 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3342 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3343
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003344- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3345 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3346 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3347 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3348 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3349 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3350 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3351 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003352 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003353
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003354- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3355 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3356 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003357
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003358- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3359 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3360 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3361 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3362 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3363 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3364 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3365 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003366 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003367 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3368 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3369
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003370- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3371 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3372 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3373 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3374 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3375 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3376 this.)
3377
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003378- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3379 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003380 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003381 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003382 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3383 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003384 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3385 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003386
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003387- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3388 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3389 currently running.
3390
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003391- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3392 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3393 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3394 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3395
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003396- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3397 as directory names.
3398
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003399- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3400 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3401
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003402- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3403 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3404
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003405- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003406 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3407 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003408
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003409- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3410 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3411 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3412 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3413 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3414
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003415- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3416 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3417 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3418 removed.
3419
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003420- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3421 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3422 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3423
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003424- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3425 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3426 to __debug__.
3427
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003428- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3429 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3430 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3431
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003432- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3433 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3434 deprecated now.
3435
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003436- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3437 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3438 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003439
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003440- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3441 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3442 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3443 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3444 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003445
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003446- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3447 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3448
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003449- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3450 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3451 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003452 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003453 is backward compatible.
3454
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003455- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3456 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3457 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3458 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3459 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3460
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003461- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3462 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3463 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3464 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3465 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3466 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003467
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003468- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3469 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3470
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003471- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3472 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3473
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003474- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3475 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3476 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3477 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3478 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3479
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003480- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3481 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3482 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3483
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003484- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003485 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3486
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003487- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3488 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3489 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003490
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003491- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3492 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3493
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003494- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3495 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3496 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3497
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003498- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3499
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003500Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003501-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003502
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003503- Added three operators to the operator module:
3504 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3505 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3506 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3507
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003508- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3509
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003510- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3511 archives.
3512
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003513- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3514 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3515 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3516
3517 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3518
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003519- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3520 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3521 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003522 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003523
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003524- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3525 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3526 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3527 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003528 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3529 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3530 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3531 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003532
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003533- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3534 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003535
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003536- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3537
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003538- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3539 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3540
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003541- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3542 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3543 supported.
3544
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003545- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3546
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003547- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3548 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003549
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003550- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3551 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3552
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003553- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3554
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003555- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3556 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3557
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003558- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3559 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3560 functions but callable type objects.
3561
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003562- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003563 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003564 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003565
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003566- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3567 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003568
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003569- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3570 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003571
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003572- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3573 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3574 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3575 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3576
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003577- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3578 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003579
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003580- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3581 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3582 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3583 and __imul__.
3584
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003585- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003586 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3587 is called.
3588
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003589- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3590 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3591 interpreter was compiled.
3592
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003593- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3594 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3595 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003596 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003597 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3598 1, not 2.
3599
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003600- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3601 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3602 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3603 limit.
3604
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003605- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3606 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3607 bug #623464.
3608
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003609- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3610 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3611 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3612 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3613
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003614Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003615-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003616
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003617- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3618
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003619- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3620 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3621 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3622 with Python 2.3a2.
3623
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003624- os.path exposes getctime.
3625
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003626- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003627 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003628 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003629 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003630 unit tests of floating point results.
3631
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003632- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3633 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3634 has been increased.
3635
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003636- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3637 executed.
3638
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003639- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3640 postinstallation script.
3641
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003642- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3643 test the current module.
3644
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003645- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003646 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3647 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3648 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3649 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3650
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003651- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003652 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003653 Ward's Optik package.
3654
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003655- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3656 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3657 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3658 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3659
3660- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3661 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003662 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003663
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003664- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3665 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3666 shelf are binary pickles.
3667
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003668- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3669 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3670
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003671- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3672 modules are iterators now.
3673
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003674- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3675 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3676 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3677 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3678 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3679 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003680
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003681- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3682 with their entity value.
3683
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003684- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3685
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003686- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3687 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003688
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003689- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3690 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003691 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003692
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003693- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3694 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3695 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3696 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3697 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3698 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3699 main():
3700
3701 import locale
3702 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3703
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003704- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3705 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3706
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003707- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3708 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3709 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3710 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3711 to the new standard.
3712
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003713- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3714 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3715 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3716 an extension to the database.
3717
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003718- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3719 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3720 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3721 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003722 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003723
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003724- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003725 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003726
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003727- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3728 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3729 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3730 bounded integers.
3731
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003732- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3733 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3734 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3735 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3736 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3737 in existence.
3738
3739 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3740 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3741 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3742 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3743 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3744 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3745
3746 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3747 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3748 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3749 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3750
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003751- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3752 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3753 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3754
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003755- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3756
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003757- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3758 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3759 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3760 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3761
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003762- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3763 argument.
3764
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003765- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3766 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3767 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3768 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3769 [SF patch 560794].
3770
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003771- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3772 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3773 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003774 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3775 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3776 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003777
3778- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3779 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003780
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003781- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3782 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3783 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3784 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003785
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003786- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3787 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3788 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3789 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3790 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3791
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003792- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003793
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003794- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3795
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003796- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3797 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3798 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3799 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3800 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3801 identical to None.
3802
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003803- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3804 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3805 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3806 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3807 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3808 results now.
3809
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003810- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3811 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3812
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003813- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3814 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3815 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3816 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3817 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3818 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3819 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3820 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3821
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003822- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3823
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003824- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3825 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3826
3827- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3828 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3829 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3830 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3831 and other systems.
3832
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003833- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3834 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3835 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3836 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 +00003837 work well with these.
3838
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003839- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3840
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003841- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003842 connections.
3843
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003844- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3845 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3846 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3847
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003848- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3849 sets
3850
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003851- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3852 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3853 name.
3854
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003855- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3856 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3857 passed in.
3858
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003859- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003860 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003861 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3862 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003863
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003864- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3865
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003866- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3867
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003868- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3869 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3870 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3871
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003872- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3873 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3874 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3875 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003876 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003877
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003878- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003879 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003880 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003881
3882- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3883 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3884 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3885
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003886- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003887 the value of its expression argument.
3888
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003889- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3890 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3891 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3892
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003893- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3894 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3895 skipstone browser was included.
3896
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003897- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3898 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3899
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003900Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003901-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003902
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003903- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3904 names in addition to accepting file names.
3905
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003906- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3907 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3908 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3909 still used and useful.)
3910
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003911- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3912 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3913 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3914 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003915
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003916- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3917 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3918 the generated binary.
3919
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003920Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003921-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003922
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003923- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3924
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003925- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3926 except in the hands of experts.
3927
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003928- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003929 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3930 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3931 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003932
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003933- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3934 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3935 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3936 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3937 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3938 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3939 builds.
3940
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003941- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3942 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3943 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3944 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3945 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3946 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3947 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3948 new type.
3949
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003950- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003951
3952 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3953 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3954 positive infinities.
3955
3956 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3957 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3958 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3959 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3960 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3961 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3962 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3963
3964 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3965
3966 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3967
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003968- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3969 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3970 size of the executable.
3971
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003972- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3973 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3974 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3975 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003976
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003977- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3978
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003979- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3980 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3981 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003982
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003983- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3984 well as Unix.
3985
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003986- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3987 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3988 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3989 modules in the README file for details.
3990
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003991C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003992-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003993
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003994- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3995 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003996 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003997 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003998 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003999
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004000- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4001 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4002 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4003 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4004 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4005 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004006 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004007 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4008 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4009 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4010 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4011 aligned.)
4012
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004013- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4014 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4015 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4016
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004017- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4018 level.
4019
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004020- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4021 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4022 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4023 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4024 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4025
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004026- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4027 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4028 code.
4029
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004030- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4031 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4032 adjusting for negative indices.
4033
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004034- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4035 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4036 object.
4037
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004038- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4039 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4040 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4041
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004042- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4043 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004044
4045- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4046
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004047- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4048 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4049 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4050 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4051
4052- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4053
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004054- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004055
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004056- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004057 without going through the buffer API.
4058
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004059- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004060
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004061- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4062 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4063 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4064 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4065
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004066- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4067 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4068
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004069- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004070 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4071
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004072New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004073-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004074
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004075- OpenVMS is now supported.
4076
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004077- AtheOS is now supported.
4078
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004079- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4080
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004081- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4082
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004083Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004084-----
4085
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004086- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4087 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4088 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004089
4090Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004091-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004092
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004093- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4094 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4095 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4096 bugs.
4097 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004098 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004099 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4100 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004101 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004102
4103- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004104 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004105
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004106- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4107 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4108
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004109- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4110 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004111 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004112 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4113
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004114- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4115 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4116 use files" uninstall option).
4117
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004118- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4119
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004120- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4121 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4122
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004123- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4124 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4125 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4126
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004127- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4128 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4129 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4130 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4131 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004132 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4133 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4134 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004135
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004136- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004137 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004138 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4139 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4140 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4141 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4142 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4143 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4144 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4145 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4146 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4147 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4148 work around.
4149
4150- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4151 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4152 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4153 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4154 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4155 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4156 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4157 specified with O_CREAT too).
4158
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004159Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004160----
4161
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004162- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004163
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004164- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4165 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4166 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4167
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004168- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4169 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4170 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4171
4172- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4173 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4174 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4175 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4176 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4177 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4178 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4179 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004180
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004181- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4182 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4183 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004184
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004185- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4186 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4187 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4188 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4189 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004190
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004191- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4192 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4193 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004194
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004195- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4196 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004197
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004198- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4199 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4200 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4201 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4202 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004203
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004204- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4205 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4206 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4207
4208- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4209 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4210 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004211
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004212- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4213 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4214 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4215 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004216 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004217
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004218- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4219 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004220
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004221- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4222 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004223
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004224- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004225 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004226 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4227 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004228
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004229
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004230What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004231===============================
4232
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004233*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4234
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004235Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004236--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004237
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004238- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4239 with a custom metaclass.
4240
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004241Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004242-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004243
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004244- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4245 are proxies.
4246
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004247Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004248-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004249
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004250- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4251 very short strings.
4252
4253- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4254 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4255 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4256 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4257 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4258
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004259Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004260-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004261
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004262- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4263 close or delete time).
4264
4265- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4266 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4267
4268- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4269
4270- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004271 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004272
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004273Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004274-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004275
4276Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004277-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004278
4279C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004280-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004281
4282New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004283-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004284
4285Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004286-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004287
4288Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004289-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004290
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004291- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4292
4293- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4294 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4295
4296- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4297 deleted at process exit time.
4298
4299- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4300 in backslash.
4301
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004302Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004303----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004304
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004305- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4306 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4307 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4308
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004309
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004310What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004311===========================
4312
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004313*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4314
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004315Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004316--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004317
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004318- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4319 been extensively updated. See
4320
4321 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4322
4323 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4324
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004325- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4326 deleted!
4327
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004328- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4329 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4330 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4331 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4332 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4333
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004334- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4335
4336 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4337 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4338
4339 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4340 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4341 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4342 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4343 supported anyway.
4344
4345 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4346 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4347
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004348- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4349 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4350 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4351 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4352 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004353
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004354- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4355 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4356 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4357
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004358Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004359-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004360
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004361- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4362 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4363 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4364 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4365 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4366 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004367 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4368 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4369 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4370 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004371
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004372- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4373 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4374 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4375
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004376Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004377-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004378
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004379- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4380
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004381Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004382-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004383
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004384- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4385 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4386 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4387 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4388 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4389 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4390
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004391- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4392
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004393- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4394
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004395- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4396
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004397- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4398 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4399 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4400
4401- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4402
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004403Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004404-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004405
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004406- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4407 off a search on Google.
4408
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004409Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004410-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004411
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004412- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4413 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4414 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4415 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4416 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4417 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4418 other platforms should do likewise.
4419
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004420- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4421 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4422 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4423
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004424C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004425-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004426
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004427- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4428 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4429 producing key-value pairs.
4430
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004431- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004432 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004433 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4434 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4435 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4436 previously went unchallenged.
4437
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004438New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004439-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004440
4441Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004442-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004443
4444Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004445-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004446
4447Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004448----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004449
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004450- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4451 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004452
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004453- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4454 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4455 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4456 home.
4457
4458
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004459What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004460===========================
4461
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004462*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4463
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004464Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004465--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004466
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004467- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4468 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004469
4470 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004471 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004472
4473 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4474 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004475 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004476 This needs to be documented.
4477
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004478- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4479 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4480
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004481- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4482 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4483 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4484
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004485- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4486 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4487
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004488- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4489 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4490 class forbids it).
4491
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004492- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4493 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4494 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4495
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004496- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4497
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004498Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004499-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004500
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004501- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4502 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004503 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004504
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004505- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4506 (like 1 + '').
4507
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004508Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004509-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004510
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004511- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4512 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4513 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4514 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004515 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004516 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4517
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004518- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4519 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4520 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4521 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4522
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004523- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4524 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004525 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4526 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4527 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004528
4529- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4530 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004531
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004532- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4533 bytes on its input.
4534
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004535Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004536-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004537
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004538- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004539 convenience function.
4540
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004541- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4542 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4543 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004544 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4545 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4546 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4547 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4548 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4549 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004550
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004551- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4552 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4553 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4554 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4555
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004556- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4557 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4558 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4559
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004560- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4561 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4562 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4563 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4564
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004565- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4566 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004567 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004568 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4569 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4570 new -l and -e options.
4571
4572- statcache is now deprecated.
4573
4574- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4575 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004576 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004577 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4578 time properly taken into account.
4579
4580- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4581 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4582 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4583 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4584
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004585Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004586-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004587
4588Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004589-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004590
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004591- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4592 is built with libdb3 if available.
4593
4594- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4595
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004596C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004597-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004598
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004599- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4600 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4601 PySequence_Size().
4602
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004603- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4604
4605- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4606 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4607 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4608
4609- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4610 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4611
4612- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4613 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4614
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004615New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004616-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004617
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004618- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4619 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4620
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004621- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4622 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4623
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004624- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4625
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004626Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004627-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004628
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004629- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4630 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4631
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004632Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004633-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004634
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004635Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004636----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004637
4638- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4639 removed completely in the next release.
4640
4641- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4642 OSX.
4643
4644- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4645 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4646
4647- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4648
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004649
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004650What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004651===========================
4652
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004653*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4654
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004655Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004656--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004657
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004658- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004659 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004660 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004661 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4662 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004663 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4664 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004665 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4666 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004667
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004668- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4669 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4670
4671- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4672 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4673
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004674Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004675-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004676
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004677- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4678 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4679 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4680 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4681 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4682 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4683 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4684 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4685
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004686- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4687 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4688 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4689 example).
4690
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004691- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004692 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004693 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004694 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004695
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004696- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4697 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4698 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004699 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004700
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004701- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4702 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4703 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4704 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4705 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4706 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4707
4708 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4709
4710 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4711
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004712Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004713-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004714
4715- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4716
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004717- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4718
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004719- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4720 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004721
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004722- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4723 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4724 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4725 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4726 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4727 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004728 attributes.
4729
4730- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4731 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4732 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004733
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004734- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4735 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4736 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004737
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004738- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4739 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4740 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004741 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4742 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4743
4744- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4745 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004746
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004747Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004748-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004749
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004750- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4751 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4752
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004753- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4754 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4755 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4756 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4757
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004758- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4759 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4760 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4761 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4762
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004763 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4764 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4765 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4766 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4767 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4768 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4769 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4770 without losing information).
4771
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004772- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004773 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4774 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4775 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4776 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4777 module).
4778
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004779 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004780 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4781 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4782 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4783 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004784
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004785- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004786 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4787 encoding.
4788
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004789- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4790 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4791
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004792- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004793 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4794
4795- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4796 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4797 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4798 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4799
4800- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4801
4802- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4803 ON, and OFF.
4804
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004805- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4806 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4807
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004808Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004809-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004810
4811- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4812 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4813 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004814
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004815- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4816 been added: -X and -E.
4817
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004818Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004819-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004820
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004821- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4822 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4823
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004824C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004825-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004826
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004827- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4828 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4829 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4830 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4831 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4832
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004833- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4834 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4835 as long) arguments.
4836
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004837- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4838 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4839 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4840 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4841 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4842 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4843
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004844- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4845 input.
4846
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004847New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004848-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004849
4850Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004851-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004852
4853Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004854-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004855
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004856- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4857 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4858 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4859
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004860- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4861 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4862 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004863 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004864
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004865 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4866 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4867 import signal
4868 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004869
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004870 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004871 while 1:
4872 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004873 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004874 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4875 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4876 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4877 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004878
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004879
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004880What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4881===========================
4882
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004883*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4884
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004885Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004886--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004887
4888- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4889 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4890 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4891
4892- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4893 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4894 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4895 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4896 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4897 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4898 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004899
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004900- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004901 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004902 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4903 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4904 associate a docstring with a property.
4905
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004906- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4907 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4908 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4909 other built-in object types.
4910
4911- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4912 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4913 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4914 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4915 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4916
4917- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4918 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4919
4920- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4921 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004922 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004923 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4924 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4925 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4926 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4927 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4928
4929- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4930 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4931 class.
4932
4933- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4934 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4935 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4936 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4937
4938- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4939 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4940 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4941 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4942
4943- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4944 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4945
4946- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4947 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4948 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4949 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4950 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004951 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004952 with the same value as s.
4953
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004954- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4955
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004956Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004957----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004958
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004959- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4960
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004961- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4962 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4963 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4964 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4965 objects.
4966
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004967- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4968 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004969 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4970 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4971
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004972- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4973 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4974 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4975
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004976Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004977-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004978
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004979- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4980 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4981 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4982 by the instances.
4983
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004984- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4985 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4986 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4987
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004988- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4989 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4990 before the entire comparison is complete.
4991
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004992- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4993 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4994 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4995
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004996- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4997 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4998 getwriter().
4999
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005000- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5001 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5002
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005003- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005004 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5005 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5006
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005007- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5008 iterable object.
5009
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005010- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5011 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005012
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005013- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5014 authentication.
5015
5016- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5017 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005018
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005019- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005020 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5021 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5022 a sample driver.)
5023
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005024Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005025-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005026
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005027- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5028 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5029 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5030 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5031 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5032 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5033 kernel has large file support.
5034
5035- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5036 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5037 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5038 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5039 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5040
5041- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5042 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5043 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5044
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005045C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005046-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005047
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005048- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5049 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5050
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005051New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005052-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005053
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005054- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5055 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5056
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005057Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005058-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005059
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005060- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5061 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5062 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5063 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5064 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5065
5066- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5067 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5068 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5069 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5070
5071- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5072 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5073
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005074Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005075-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005076
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005077- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005078 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5079 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005080
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005081
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005082What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5083===========================
5084
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005085*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5086
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005087Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005088----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005089
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005090- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5091 big to represent as a C double.
5092
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005093- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5094 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5095 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5096 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5097 restriction).
5098
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005099- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5100 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5101 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5102 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5103 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5104
5105 >>> dir([])
5106 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5107 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5108 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5109 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5110 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5111 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5112 'reverse', 'sort']
5113
5114 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5115
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005116- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005117 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5118 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5119 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5120 OverflowError exception.
5121
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005122- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005123 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005124 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5125 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5126 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5127 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5128 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005129 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005130 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5131 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5132
5133 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5134 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5135 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5136 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005137
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005138- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005139 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5140 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5141 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5142 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5143 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5144 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5145 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5146 once it is created.
5147
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005148- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5149 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5150 (key, value) pairs.
5151
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005152- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005153 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5154 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5155
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005156- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5157 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5158 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5159 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5160 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005161
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005162- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005163 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5164 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5165
5166 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5167
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005168- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005169 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5170
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005171Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005172-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005173
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005174- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005175 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5176 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005177
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005178- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5179 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5180 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5181 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5182 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5183 in this area anymore).
5184
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005185- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5186 threading.Timer.
5187
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005188- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5189 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5190
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005191- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005192 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5193
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005194- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005195 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5196 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5197 converted to Python longs.
5198
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005199- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005200 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5201
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005202- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5203 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5204 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5205
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005206Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005207-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005208
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005209- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5210 division operators as per PEP 238.
5211
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005212Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005213-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005214
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005215- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5216 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5217 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5218 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5219
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005220C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005221-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005222
5223- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005224
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005225- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5226 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005227 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005228
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005229 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5230 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005231 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005232 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005233
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005234- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005235 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5236 module:
5237
5238 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005239
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005240 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5241 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005242
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005243 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5244 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005245
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005246 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5247
5248 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5249
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005250- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005251 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5252 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5253 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005254
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005255New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005256-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005257
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005258- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5259 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5260 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5261 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5262 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005263
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005264Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005265-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005266
5267Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005268-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005269
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005270- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5271 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5272 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5273 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005274 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5275 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5276 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5277 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5278 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005279
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005280- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005281 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5282
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005283
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005284What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5285===========================
5286
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005287*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5288
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005289Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005290-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005291
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005292- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5293 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5294
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005295- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5296 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5297 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005298
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005299- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5300 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5301 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5302 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005303
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005304- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5305
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005306- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005307
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005308Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005309-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005310
5311- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005312 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005313 the module docstring for details.
5314
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005315Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005316-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005317
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005318- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005319 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5320 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5321 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005322
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005323- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5324 Nick Mathewson.
5325
5326Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005327----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005328
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005329- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5330 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5331 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5332 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5333 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5334 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5335 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5336 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5337
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005338- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5339 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5340 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5341 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5342
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005343- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5344 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5345 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5346 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5347 come a long way).
5348
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005349- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5350 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5351 write filters for these warnings).
5352
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005353- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5354 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5355 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5356 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5357 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5358
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005359- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5360 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5361 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5362 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5363 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5364 older distribution.
5365
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005366Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005367-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005368
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005369- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5370 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005371 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005372
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005373- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5374 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5375 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5376
5377- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5378
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005379- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5380
5381- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5382
5383- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5384
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005385- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005386
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005387- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5388
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005389New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005390-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005391
5392C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005393-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005394
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005395- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5396 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5397 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5398 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5399 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5400 against buffer overruns.
5401
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005402- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005403 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5404 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005405 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5406 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5407 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5408
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005409- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5410 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5411 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5412 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5413 deprecated.
5414
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005415Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005416-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005417
5418- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5419 relevant is found.
5420
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005421
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005422What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005423===========================
5424
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005425*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5426
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005427Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005428----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005429
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005430- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5431 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5432 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5433 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5434 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5435 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5436 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5437 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005438 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005439 repaired.
5440
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005441- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005442 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005443 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5444 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5445 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5446 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5447 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5448 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5449 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5450 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5451
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005452- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5453 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5454 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5455 leading BMO character).
5456
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005457- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5458 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5459 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5460
5461 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5462 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5463 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005464
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005465 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5466 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5467 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5468 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5469 for various simple to use conversions.
5470
5471 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5472 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5473
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005474 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5475 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5476 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5477 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5478 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5479 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5480 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5481 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5482 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5483 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5484 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5485 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5486 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5487 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5488 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005489
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005490- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5491 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5492 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005493 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005494 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005495
5496 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005497 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5498 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5499 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5500 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5501 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005502 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5503 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005504
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005505 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5506 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5507 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005508 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005509
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005510- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5511 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5512 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5513 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5514 floating arithmetic,
5515
5516 x = 9007199254740992.0
5517 print long(x)
5518
5519 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5520 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5521 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5522 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5523 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5524 functions are of good quality).
5525
5526 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5527 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5528 algorithms to break.
5529
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005530- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5531 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5532 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5533 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5534 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5535 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5536 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5537 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5538 order.
5539
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005540- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5541 operation along the most common code paths.
5542
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005543- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5544 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5545
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005546- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5547 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5548 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5549 {}.update(UserDict())
5550
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005551- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5552 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5553 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5554 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5555 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5556 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5557 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5558 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5559
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005560- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005561 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005562
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005563 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005564 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5565 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005566 join() method of strings
5567 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005568 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5569 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005570 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005571 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005572
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005573- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5574 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5575
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005576- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5577 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5578
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005579- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5580 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5581 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5582 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5583
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005584- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5585 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005586 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005587 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5588 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005589
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005590- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5591
5592
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005593Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005594-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005595
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005596- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005597 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005598 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5599 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5600
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005601- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5602 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5603
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005604- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5605 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5606 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5607 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5608
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005609- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5610 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5611 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5612
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005613- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5614
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005615- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5616
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005617- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5618 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5619 that are still imported into string.py).
5620
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005621- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5622
5623- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5624 Now it does.
5625
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005626- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5627
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005628- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5629 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5630 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5631 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5632 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005633 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5634 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005635
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005636- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5637 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5638 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5639 'help(object)'.
5640
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005641Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005642-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005643
5644- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005645 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005646 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5647 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5648
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005649- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005650 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5651 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005652
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005653C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005654-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005655
5656- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5657 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005658
5659----
5660
5661**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**