blob: c087a11e0e78c47107f45e3047d3efbd47caa582 [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
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000015- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
16 and long longs.
17
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000018- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
19 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
20 message in this case.
21
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000022- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
23 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
24 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
25 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
26 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
27
28- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
29
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000030- Speed up some Unicode operations.
31
32- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
33
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000034- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000035 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
36
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000037- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
38
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000039- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
40 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
41
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000042- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
43
44- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
45
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000046- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
47 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
48 was empty.
49
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000050- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
51 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
52
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000053- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000054 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000055
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000056- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
57 codes.
58
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000059- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
60 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
61 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
62
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000063- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
64 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
65
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000066- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000067 (fixes bug #1119418).
68
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000069- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
70
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000071- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
72 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
73
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000074- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
75 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
76 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
77
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000078- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
79
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000080- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
81 reference counts in some error exit cases.
82
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000083- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
84 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
85 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
86 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
87 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
88 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
89 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
90 realloc.
91
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000092- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
93 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
94
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000095- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
96 like their int counterparts.
97
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000098- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
99 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
100 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
101 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
102 for a longer write-up of the problem).
103
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000104- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
105 serializing floats.
106
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000107- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
108 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
109 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
110
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000111- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
112 278.
113
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000114- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
115 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
116 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
117 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000118 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000119 PyNumber_*().
120 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
121
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000122- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
123 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
124 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
125 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
126
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000127- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
128 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
129 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
130 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
131 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
132
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000133- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
134 disabled caused a crash.
135
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000136- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
137 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
138
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000139- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000140 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
141
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000142- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
143
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000144- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000145 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
146 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
147 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000148
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000149- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
150
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000151- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
152 returning None.
153
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000154- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000155 ('\') with a specific error message.
156
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000157- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
158
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000159- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
160 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
161
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000162- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000163 an ferror() call.
164
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000165- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
166 list.sort().
167
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000168- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
169 (2+3) --> (5).
170
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000171- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
172
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000173- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
174 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000175
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000176- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
177 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
178 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
179
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000180- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
181 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
182 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
183
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000184Extension Modules
185-----------------
186
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000187- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
188
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000189- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
190
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000191- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
192
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000193- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
194 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
195
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000196- Get bsddb module to build with BSD DB version 3.2
197
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000198- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
199 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
200
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000201- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
202
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000203- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
204 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
205
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000206- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
207 returns in cStringIO.c.
208
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000209- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
210 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
211
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000212- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
213
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000214- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
215
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000216- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
217 the file system encoding.
218
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000219- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
220 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000221
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000222- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
223
224- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000225 line without newlines.
226
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000227- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
228 on Windows.
229
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000230- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000231 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
232
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000233- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
234 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
235 for large or negative values.
236
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000237- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000238 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000239
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000240- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
241
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000242- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
243 if available on the platform.
244
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000245- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
246 available on the platform.
247
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000248- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
249 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
250
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000251- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
252
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000253- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
254 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
255 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
256
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000257- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
258
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000259- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
260 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
261
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000262- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000263 file size.
264
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000265- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
266
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000267- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
268 {remove_history,replace_history}
269
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000270- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
271 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000272
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000273- stat_float_times is now True.
274
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000275- array.array objects are now picklable.
276
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000277- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
278 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
279
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000280- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
281 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
282 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
283
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000284- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
285 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000286
287Library
288-------
289
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000290- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
291
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000292- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
293 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
294 illegal argument)
295
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000296- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
297 is an error in the format string.
298
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000299- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
300
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000301- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000302 "parent" argument.
303
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000304- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
305 for padding.
306
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000307- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
308 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
309
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000310- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
311 to get the correct encoding.
312
313- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
314 languages.
315
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000316- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
317
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000318- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
319
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000320- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
321
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000322- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
323 functionality.
324
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000325- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
326
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000327- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
328 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
329
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000330- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
331 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
332 match the Content-Length header.
333
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000334- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
335
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000336- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
337 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000338 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000339
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000340- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
341
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000342- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
343
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000344- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
345 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
346
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000347- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
348 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
349 Tkdnd.
350
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000351- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
352 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
353
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000354- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
355 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
356
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000357- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000358 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
359
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000360- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
361 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
362
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000363- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
364 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
365
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000366- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000367 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000368
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000369- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
370
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000371- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
372 error messages.
373
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000374- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
375
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000376- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
377 Bug #1224621.
378
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000379- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
380 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
381 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
382 terminates by raising StopIteration.
383
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000384- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
385
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000386- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
387 component of the path.
388
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000389- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
390 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
391 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
392 class at all.
393
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000394- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
395 files to PyPI.
396
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000397- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
398 them to PyPI.
399
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000400- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
401 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
402 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
403 work as expected.
404
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000405- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
406 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
407
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000408- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000409 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
410
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000411- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
412
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000413- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
414 to build.
415
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000416- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
417 symbolic links on Windows.
418
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000419- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000420 profile.py if available.
421
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000422- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
423
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000424- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
425 in LWPCookieJar.
426
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000427- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
428
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000429- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
430
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000431- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
432
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000433- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
434
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000435- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
436
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000437- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
438
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000439- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
440
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000441- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
442
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000443- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
444 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
445 be exploited in various ways.
446
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000447- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
448
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000449- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
450
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000451- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
452
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000453- Enhancements to the csv module:
454
455 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000456 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000457 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000458 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
459 reporting.
460 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
461 dictates.
462 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000463 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000464 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000465 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
466 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000467 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
468 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000469 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000470 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
471 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
472 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
473 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
474 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
475 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
476 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
477 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
478 without first creating a dialect class.
479 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
480 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
481 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000482 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000483 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
484 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000485 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
486 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
487 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
488 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000489 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
490 This has been fixed.
491
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000492- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
493 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
494 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
495 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
496
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000497- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
498
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000499- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
500 (Bug #951915).
501
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000502- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
503 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
504 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000505 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000506
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000507- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
508
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000509- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
510 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
511
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000512- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
513
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000514- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
515
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000516- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
517
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000518- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
519
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000520- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
521
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000522- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
523 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
524 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
525
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000526- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000527 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000528
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000529- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
530 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
531 tokenizer with very long source lines.
532
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000533- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
534 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
535
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000536- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
537 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000538
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000539- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
540 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
541
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000542- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
543 correctly.
544
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000545- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
546 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
547 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
548 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
549 between two lines.
550
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000551- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
552 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
553 handlers.
554
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000555- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000556 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
557 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000558
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000559- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
560 considering it exactly like a '*'.
561
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000562- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
563 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000564
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000565- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
566
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000567Build
568-----
569
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000570- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
571 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
572
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000573- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
574 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
575
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000576- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
577 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
578 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000579 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000580
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000581- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
582 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
583 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
584
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000585- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
586
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000587- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
588 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
589
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000590- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
591 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
592 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
593 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
594 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
595 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
596 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
597 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
598
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000599- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
600 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
601 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
602 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
603
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000604
605C API
606-----
607
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000608- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
609
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000610- Removed PyRange_New().
611
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000612- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
613 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
614 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
615 mappings.
616
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000617
618Tests
619-----
620
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000621- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000622
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000623
624Documentation
625-------------
626
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000627- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
628
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000629- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
630
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000631- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
632
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000633- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
634
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000635- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
636
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000637- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
638
639- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
640
641- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
642
643- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
644
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000645- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
646 Closes bug #1166582.
647
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000648- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
649 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
650 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
651
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000652Mac
653---
654
655
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000656New platforms
657-------------
658
659- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
660
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000661
662Tools/Demos
663-----------
664
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000665- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
666 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
667 source files that need an encoding declaration.
668 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
669
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000670- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
671
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000672- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000673
674
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000675What's New in Python 2.4 final?
676===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000677
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000678*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000679
680Core and builtins
681-----------------
682
683- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
684 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
685 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
686
687
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000688What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
689==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000690
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000691*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000692
693Core and builtins
694-----------------
695
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000696- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
697 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
698 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
699
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000700
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000701Library
702-------
703
704- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
705 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
706 raised is re-raised.
707
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000708- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
709 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
710
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000711- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
712 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
713 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
714 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
715 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
716 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
717 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
718 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
719 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
720 by the slice are recomputed now.
721
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000722- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000723
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000724Build
725-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000726
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000727- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
728 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
729 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000730
731C API
732-----
733
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000734- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
735
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000736
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000737What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
738================================
739
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000740*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000741
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000742License
743-------
744
745The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
746is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
747changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
748Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
749intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
750durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
751the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
752License::
753
754 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
755
756says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
757to Python 2.1.1.
758
759The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
760License Version 2.
761
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000762Core and builtins
763-----------------
764
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000765- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
766 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
767 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
768 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
769 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
770 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
771 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000772 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000773 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
774 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
775
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000776- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000777
778Extension Modules
779-----------------
780
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000781- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
782 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
783 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
784 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000785
786Library
787-------
788
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000789- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
790 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
791 returned.
792
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000793- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
794
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000795- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
796 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
797
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000798- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
799
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000800- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
801 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000802
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000803- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
804
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000805- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
806
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000807- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000808 the source code is updated and reloaded.
809
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000810Build
811-----
812
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000813- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000814
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000815What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
816================================
817
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000818*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000819
820Core and builtins
821-----------------
822
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000823- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000824 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
825
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000826- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
827 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
828 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
829 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
830
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000831- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
832 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
833
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000834- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
835 constant.
836
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000837- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
838 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
839 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
840 large), and to anomalies such as
841 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
842 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
843 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
844 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000845
846Extension modules
847-----------------
848
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000849- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
850 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000851 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
852 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
853 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000854
855Library
856-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000857
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000858- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000859 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000860 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
861 --swig-cpp.
862
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000863- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
864 it is set.
865
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000866- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000867
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000868- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
869 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
870 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
871 Closes bug #1039270.
872
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000873- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000874
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000875 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000876 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
877 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
878 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
879 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
880 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
881 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
882 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
883 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
884 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
885 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
886 + Updates to documentation.
887
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000888- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
889 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
890 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
891 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
892
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000893- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000894
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000895- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
896 applications should use the getmember function.
897
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000898- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
899
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000900- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
901 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
902 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
903 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
904 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
905 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
906 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
907 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
908 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
909
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000910- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
911 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000912 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000913
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000914- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
915 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
916 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
917 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
918 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
919 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
920 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
921 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000922
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000923- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
924 the new public features (of which there are many).
925
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000926- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000927 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
928 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
929 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
930 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000931 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000932
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000933- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
934
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000935- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
936 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
937 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
938 options.
939
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000940- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
941 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
942 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
943 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
944 conditions under which non-string values work.
945
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000946Build
947-----
948
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000949- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
950 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
951 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
952
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000953- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
954 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
955 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
956 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
957 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000958
959C API
960-----
961
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000962- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
963 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
964
965- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
966
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000967- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
968 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
969 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
970 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
971 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
972 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
973 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
974 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
975 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
976
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000977- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
978
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000979- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
980 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
981 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000982
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000983Tests
984-----
985
986- test__locale ported to unittest
987
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000988Mac
989---
990
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000991- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
992 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
993 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000994
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000995Tools/Demos
996-----------
997
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000998- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
999 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1000 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1001 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1002 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001003
1004
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001005What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1006=================================
1007
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001008*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001009
1010Core and builtins
1011-----------------
1012
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001013- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001014 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1015
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001016- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1017 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1018 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1019 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1020 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1021 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1022 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1023 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001024 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1025 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1026 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1027 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1028 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001029
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001030- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1031 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1032 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1033 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1034 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1035
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001036- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1037
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001038- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1039 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1040
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001041- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1042 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1043 modified the list.
1044
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001045- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1046 functions is now writable.
1047
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001048- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1049 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1050 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1051 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1052
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001053- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1054 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1055 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1056 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1057 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001058
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001059- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1060 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1061
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001062Extension modules
1063-----------------
1064
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001065- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1066
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001067- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1068 data.
1069
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001070- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1071 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1072 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1073 supposed to have been truncated away.
1074
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001075- Added socket.socketpair().
1076
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001077- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1078 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1079
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001080- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001081 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1082
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001083Library
1084-------
1085
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001086- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001087 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001088
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001089- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1090 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1091
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001092- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1093 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1094
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001095- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1096
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001097- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1098 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001099
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001100- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1101 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1102
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001103- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1104
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001105- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1106
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001107- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1108
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001109- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1110 Percivall.
1111
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001112- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1113 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1114
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001115- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1116 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1117 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001118 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001119
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001120- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1121 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1122 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1123 and exponent.
1124
1125- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1126
1127- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001128 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001129 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1130
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001131- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1132 to the readline module.
1133
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001134- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001135 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1136 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001137
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001138- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1139 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1140 contains symlinks.
1141
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001142- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1143 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1144
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001145- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1146 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1147 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1148
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001149- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1150 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1151 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1152 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1153 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1154 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1155 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1156 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1157 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1158 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1159 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1160 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1161 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1162
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001163- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1164
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001165Tools/Demos
1166-----------
1167
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001168- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1169 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1170
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001171- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1172
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001173Build
1174-----
1175
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001176- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1177 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1178 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1179 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1180 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1181 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1182 plans to do so.
1183
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001184- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1185 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1186
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001187- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1188 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1189
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001190- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1191 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1192
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001193- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1194 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1195
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001196- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1197 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1198
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001199C API
1200-----
1201
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001202..
1203
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001204Documentation
1205-------------
1206
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001207- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1208 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1209
1210- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1211 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1212 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001213
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001214New platforms
1215-------------
1216
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001217- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1218
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001219Tests
1220-----
1221
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001222..
1223
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001224Windows
1225-------
1226
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001227- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1228 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1229 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1230 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1231 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1232 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1233 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1234 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1235 the problem.
1236
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001237Mac
1238---
1239
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001240..
1241
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001242
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001243What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1244=================================
1245
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001246*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001247
1248Core and builtins
1249-----------------
1250
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001251- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1252 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1253 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1254 sensitive code.
1255
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001256- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001257 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001258
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001259 @staticmethod
1260 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001261
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001262 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001263
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001264- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1265 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1266 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1267 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1268 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1269 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1270 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1271 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1272 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1273 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1274 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1275
1276 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1277 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1278 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1279 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1280 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1281 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1282 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1283
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001284- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1285 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1286
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001287- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001288 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001289
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001290- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001291 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001292 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1293
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001294- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001295 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1296 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1297
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001298- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1299 types that support garbage collection.
1300
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001301- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1302
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001303- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1304 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1305 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1306 Jython.
1307
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001308- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1309
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001310- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1311 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1312
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001313- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1314 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1315 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001316
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001317- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1318 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1319 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1320
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001321Extension modules
1322-----------------
1323
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001324- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1325
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001326Library
1327-------
1328
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001329- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1330 TIS-620
1331
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001332- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1333 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1334 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1335 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1336 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1337 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1338 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1339 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1340 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1341 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1342
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001343- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1344
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001345- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1346 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1347 same as when the argument is omitted).
1348 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1349
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001350- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1351
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001352- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1353 schemes are offered.
1354
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001355- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1356
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001357- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1358 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1359 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1360
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001361- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1362
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001363- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1364 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1365
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001366- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1367 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1368 when dummy_threading is being used.
1369
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001370- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1371 from a tarfile.
1372
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001373- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001374 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001375
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001376- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1377 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1378 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1379 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1380
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001381- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1382 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1383
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001384- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1385 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1386 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1387 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1388 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1389 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1390 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1391 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1392 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1393 by some other method in progress).
1394
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001395- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1396 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1397 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001398
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001399- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1400
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001401- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1402 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1403 AM Kuchling.
1404
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001405- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1406 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1407 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1408
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001409- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1410 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1411 instead of unsigned.
1412
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001413- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001414 no longer part of the public API.
1415
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001416- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1417 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1418 string methods of the same name).
1419
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001420- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001421 SF patch 945642.
1422
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001423- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1424
1425 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1426
1427 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1428 DocTestSuites.
1429
1430- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1431 that provide thread-local data.
1432
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001433- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1434 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1435
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001436- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1437
1438- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1439 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1440 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1441
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001442- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1443
1444 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1445 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1446 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001447
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001448 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1449 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1450 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1451 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1452
1453 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1454 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1455
1456 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1457 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1458 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1459 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1460
1461 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1462 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1463 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1464 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1465 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1466
1467 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1468 wrapping help output.
1469
1470 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1471 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1472 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001473
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001474C API
1475-----
1476
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001477- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1478 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1479 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1480 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1481 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1482 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1483 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1484 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1485 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1486 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1487 its visible semantics have not changed.
1488
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001489- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1490 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1491
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001492Documentation
1493-------------
1494
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001495- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001496
1497 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001498 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001499
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001500 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001501
1502 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1503
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001504- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001505
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001506Tests
1507-----
1508
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001509- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001510 platforms that use the Makefile.
1511
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001512- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1513 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1514 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1515
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001516
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001517What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1518=================================
1519
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001520*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001521
1522Core and builtins
1523-----------------
1524
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001525- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1526 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1527 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1528 objects now (one object instead of three).
1529
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001530- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1531 Windows DLLs.
1532
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001533- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1534 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001535
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001536- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1537 a new .pyc magic.
1538
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001539- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1540 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1541 be there.
1542
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001543- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1544 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1545 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1546
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001547- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1548 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1549 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1550
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001551- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1552
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001553- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1554 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1555 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001556
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001557- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1558 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1559
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001560- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1561
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001562- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001563 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001564
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001565- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1566
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001567- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1568
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001569- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1570 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1571
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001572- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1573 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1574 Fixes bug #858016 .
1575
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001576- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1577 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1578 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1579
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001580- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1581 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1582 improves their performance (about 35%).
1583
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001584- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1585 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1586 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1587
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001588- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1589 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1590 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1591 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1592
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001593- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1594 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001595 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001596 length is not known).
1597
1598- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1599 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001600 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1601 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001602 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1603
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001604- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1605 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1606
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001607- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1608 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1609 keyword arguments.
1610
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001611- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1612 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1613 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1614
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001615- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1616 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1617 cases.
1618
1619- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1620 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1621 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1622 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1623 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1624 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1625 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1626 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1627 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1628 a release build.
1629
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001630- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1631 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1632
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001633- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001634 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001635
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001636- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1637 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1638 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1639 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1640 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1641 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1642 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1643 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1644 destroyed.
1645
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001646- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1647 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1648 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1649 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1650 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1651 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1652 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1653 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1654
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001655- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1656 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1657 character other than a space.
1658
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001659- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1660 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1661 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1662 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1663 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1664 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1665 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1666 attributes with the same name.
1667
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001668- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1669 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1670 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1671 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1672 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1673 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1674 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1675 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1676 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1677 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1678 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1679 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1680 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1681 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001682
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001683- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1684 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1685 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1686 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1687 This has been repaired.
1688
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001689- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1690
1691- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1692
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001693- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1694 over a sequence.
1695
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001696- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001697 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001698
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001699- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1700
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001701- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1702 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1703 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1704 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1705 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1706 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1707 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1708 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1709
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001710- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1711 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1712 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1713
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001714- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1715 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1716 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1717 freelist.
1718
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001719- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1720 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1721
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001722- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1723 number.
1724
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001725- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1726 a TypeError exception.
1727
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001728- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1729 820195.
1730
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001731- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1732 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1733 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1734
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001735- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001736 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1737 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001738
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001739- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1740 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1741 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1742
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001743- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1744 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001745 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001746
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001747- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001748 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1749 the first call.
1750
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001751
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001752Extension modules
1753-----------------
1754
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001755- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1756 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1757
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001758- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1759 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1760 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1761 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1762 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1763 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1764 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001765
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001766- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1767
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001768- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1769
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001770- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1771 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1772
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001773- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1774 fewer false positives.
1775
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001776- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1777 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1778
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001779- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001780 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1781
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001782- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001783 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001784 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001785 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1786 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001787
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001788- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1789 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1790 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1791 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1792
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001793- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1794 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1795 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1796 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1797 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1798 #897625.
1799
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001800- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1801 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1802
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001803- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1804 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1805 and pops on either side of the deque.
1806
1807- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1808 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1809
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001810- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1811 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1812 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1813 other functions that expect a function argument.
1814
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001815- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1816
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001817- os.getsid was added.
1818
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001819- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1820 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1821 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1822
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001823- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1824
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001825- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1826
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001827- readline.clear_history was added.
1828
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001829- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1830
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001831- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1832
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001833- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1834
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001835- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1836
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001837- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1838
1839- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1840
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001841- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1842
1843- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1844
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001845- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1846 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1847 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1848
1849- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1850 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1851 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1852 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1853 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1854 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1855 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1856
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001857- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1858 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1859 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1860 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001861
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001862- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001863 iterators from a single iterable.
1864
1865- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1866 of raising a TypeError exception.
1867
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001868- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1869 as parameter.
1870
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001871Library
1872-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001873
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001874- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1875
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001876- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1877 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1878 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001879
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001880- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1881 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1882 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001883
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001884- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001885
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001886- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1887 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001888
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001889- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1890 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1891
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001892- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1893
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001894- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001895 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001896
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001897- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001898 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001899
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001900- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1901
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001902- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1903 on cygwin and mingw32.
1904
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001905- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1906
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001907- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1908 module.
1909
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001910- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1911 installation scheme for all platforms.
1912
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001913- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001914 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001915
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001916- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1917 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1918 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1919
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001920- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1921 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1922 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1923
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001924- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1925
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001926- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1927
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001928- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1929 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1930
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001931- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1932 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1933 type pattern with the same value exists.
1934
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001935- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1936 when run from the command prompt).
1937
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001938- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1939 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1940
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001941- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1942 default sort).
1943
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001944- Added global runctx function to profile module
1945
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001946- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1947
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001948- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1949
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001950- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1951
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001952- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001953 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1954 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1955 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1956 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1957 accordingly.
1958
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001959- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1960 decoding standards.
1961
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001962- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1963 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1964 called for all requests.
1965
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001966- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1967 they are passed to the compiler.
1968
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001969- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1970 indent, width and depth.
1971
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001972- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1973 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1974
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001975- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1976 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1977
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001978- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1979
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001980- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1981
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001982- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1983
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001984- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1985 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1986
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001987- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001988 for better performance.
1989
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001990- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001991
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001992- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1993 a string).
1994
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001995- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1996
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001997- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1998
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001999- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2000
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002001- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2002
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002003- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2004 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2005 list of fieldnames.
2006
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002007- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2008 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2009
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002010- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2011
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002012- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2013 empty lists.
2014
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002015- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2016 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2017 and shelves.
2018
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002019- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2020 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2021
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002022- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002023 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2024 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002025
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002026- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2027 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002028 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002029
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002030- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002031 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2032 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2033
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002034- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2035 and removed in Py2.4.
2036
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002037- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2038
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002039- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2040
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002041Tools/Demos
2042-----------
2043
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002044- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2045 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2046
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002047- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2048
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002049- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2050 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2051 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2052 destination in situations where both files are given.
2053
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002054- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2055 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2056 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2057 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2058
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002059- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2060
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002061- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2062 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2063 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2064 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2065 now.
2066
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002067- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2068 in effect
2069
2070- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2071 C-c C-h
2072
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002073- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2074 -d option was given.
2075
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002076Build
2077-----
2078
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002079- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2080 build under OS X.
2081
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002082- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2083 --enable-profiling.
2084
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002085- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2086 is configured --with-tsc.
2087
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002088- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2089 on AMD64.
2090
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002091- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2092 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2093
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002094- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2095 removed.
2096
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002097- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2098 supported (see PEP 11).
2099
2100- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2101
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002102- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2103
2104- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2105 (see PEP 11).
2106
2107- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2108 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2109
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002110C API
2111-----
2112
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002113- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2114 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2115 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2116
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002117- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2118 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2119 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2120 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2121
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002122- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2123 generator objects.
2124
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002125- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2126 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002127 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2128 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002129
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002130- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2131 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2132
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002133- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2134 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2135 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2136 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2137 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2138
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002139- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2140 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2141 about 10% faster.
2142
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002143- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2144 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2145
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002146- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2147 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2148 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2149 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2150
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002151Windows
2152-------
2153
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002154- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2155 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2156 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2157 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2158
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002159- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2160 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2161 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2162
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002163
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002164What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2165===============================
2166
2167*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2168
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002169IDLE
2170----
2171
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002172- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2173 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2174 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2175 context-menu actions.
2176
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002177- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2178 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2179 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2180 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2181 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2182 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2183 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2184 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2185 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2186
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002187
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002188What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2189=============================================
2190
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002191*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002192
2193Core and builtins
2194-----------------
2195
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002196- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002197 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002198 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2199
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002200Extension modules
2201-----------------
2202
2203- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2204 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2205 than once. This has been fixed.
2206
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002207- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2208 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2209 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2210 call.
2211
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002212- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2213
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002214Library
2215-------
2216
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002217- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2218 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2219
2220- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2221 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2222 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2223 restored.
2224
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002225IDLE
2226----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002227
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002228- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002229
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002230Build
2231-----
2232
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002233- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2234 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2235
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002236C API
2237-----
2238
2239Windows
2240-------
2241
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002242- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2243 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2244
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002245- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2246
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002247Mac
2248---
2249
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002250- Various fixes to pimp.
2251
2252- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2253
2254- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2255 more problems than it solves.
2256
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002257
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002258What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2259=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002260
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002261*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2262
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002263Core and builtins
2264-----------------
2265
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002266- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2267 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2268
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002269- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2270 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002271 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002272
2273- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2274 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2275 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002276 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002277
2278- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2279 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002280
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002281- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2282 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2283 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2284
2285- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002286 770247.
2287
2288- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002289
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002290Extension modules
2291-----------------
2292
2293- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2294 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2295
2296- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2297
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002298- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2299
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002300- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2301 contained within the _strptime module.
2302
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002303- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2304 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2305
2306- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002307 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2308
2309- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2310 the find_class attribute, if present.
2311
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002312- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002313
2314 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2315 (SF bug 763298).
2316
2317 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002318 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2319 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2320 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002321
2322 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2323
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002324Library
2325-------
2326
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002327- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2328
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002329- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2330 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2331 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2332 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2333 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2334 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2335 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2336 or Tester().
2337
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002338- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2339 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2340 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2341 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2342 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2343 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2344 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2345 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2346 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002347
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002348 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002349
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002350- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2351 weren't before was an oversight.
2352
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002353- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2354 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2355
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002356- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2357 when there are no lines.
2358
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002359- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2360 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2361
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002362- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2363 to child processes.
2364
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002365- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2366
2367- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2368
2369- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2370 xmlrpclib.
2371
2372- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2373 responses.
2374
2375- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2376 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2377
2378- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2379 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2380 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2381
2382- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2383 used as patterns.
2384
2385- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2386 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2387 than Tk 8.3.
2388
2389- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2390
2391- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002392
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002393Tools/Demos
2394-----------
2395
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002396- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2397
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002398- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2399
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002400- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002401
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002402Build
2403-----
2404
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002405- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2406
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002407- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2408
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002409- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2410 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002411
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002412- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2413 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2414 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002415
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002416C API
2417-----
2418
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002419- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2420 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2421
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002422Windows
2423-------
2424
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002425- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2426 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2427 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2428 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2429 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2430 Python exception ::
2431
2432 thread.error: can't start new thread
2433
2434 is raised now.
2435
2436- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2437 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2438 instead of from DLL teardown.
2439
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002440Mac
2441---
2442
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002443- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002444 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002445 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2446 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2447 the executable in the bundle.
2448
2449- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002450
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002451- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2452
2453- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2454 on Panther.
2455
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002456What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2457================================
2458
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002459*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002460
2461Core and builtins
2462-----------------
2463
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002464- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2465 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2466 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2467 with the -i option.
2468
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002469- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2470 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2471
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002472- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2473 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2474
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002475- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2476 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2477 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2478 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2479 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2480 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2481 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2482 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2483 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2484 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2485 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2486 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2487 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002488
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002489- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2490 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2491 embedded in a lambda expression.
2492
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002493- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2494 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2495 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2496 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2497 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2498
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002499- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2500 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2501 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2502
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002503- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2504 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2505
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002506- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2507 It's writable again.
2508
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002509- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2510 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2511 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002512 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002513
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002514- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2515 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2516 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2517
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002518Extension modules
2519-----------------
2520
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002521- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2522 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2523
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002524- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2525 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2526 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2527 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2528
2529- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2530 collection.
2531
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002532- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2533 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2534 unique within a single program run.
2535
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002536- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2537 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2538
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002539- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2540 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2541
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002542- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2543 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002544
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002545- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2546
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002547- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2548 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2549
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002550- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2551 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2552 for many BSD-derived systems.
2553
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002554
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002555Library
2556-------
2557
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002558- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2559 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2560 primary ones:
2561
2562 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2563 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2564 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2565
2566 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2567 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2568 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2569 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2570 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2571 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2572
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002573- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2574 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2575 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2576 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2577 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2578 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2579 argument.
2580
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002581- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2582 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2583 in the archive.
2584
2585- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2586 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2587
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002588- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2589 569574).
2590
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002591- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2592 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2593 no more.
2594
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002595- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2596 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2597 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2598 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2599 code coverage.
2600
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002601- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2602 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2603 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002604 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2605 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002606
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002607- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2608 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2609 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002610 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002611
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002612- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2613
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002614- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2615 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2616 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2617 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2618
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002619- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2620 handling.
2621
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002622- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2623 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2624
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002625- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2626 in socket.py.
2627
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002628- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2629
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002630- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2631 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2632 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2633 opener with proxy support.
2634
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002635- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2636
2637- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2638
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002639Tools/Demos
2640-----------
2641
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002642- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2643
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002644- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2645
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002646- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2647 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002648
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002649- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2650 files.
2651
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002652Build
2653-----
2654
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002655- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002656 different root directory.
2657
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002658C API
2659-----
2660
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002661- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2662 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2663 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2664 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2665 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2666 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2667 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2668 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2669 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2670 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2671
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002672- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2673 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2674 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2675 from Python.
2676
2677
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002678New platforms
2679-------------
2680
2681None this time.
2682
2683Tests
2684-----
2685
2686- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2687 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2688
2689Windows
2690-------
2691
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002692- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2693
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002694- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2695 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2696 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2697 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2698 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2699 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2700 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2701 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2702 that's what it's for.
2703
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002704Mac
2705---
2706
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002707- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2708 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2709 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2710 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002711- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2712 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2713- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002714
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002715SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2716------------------------------------
2717
2718430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2719598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2720622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2721661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2722683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2723697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2724713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2725724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2726727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2727729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2728730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2729731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2730732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2731733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2732735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2733740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2734744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2735745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2736747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2737749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2738751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2739753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2740755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2741757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2742760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2743
2744
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002745What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2746================================
2747
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002748*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002749
2750Core and builtins
2751-----------------
2752
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002753- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2754 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2755
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002756- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2757 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2758 and cannot be strings).
2759
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002760- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2761 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2762 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2763 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2764
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002765- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2766 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2767 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2768 Python itself.
2769
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002770- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2771 the referenced object, if it has one.
2772
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002773- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2774 the thread started at
2775 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2776
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002777- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2778 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2779 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2780 placed on a list index.
2781
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002782- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2783 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2784 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2785 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2786
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002787- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2788 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2789 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2790 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2791 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2792 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2793 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2794
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002795- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2796 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2797 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2798 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2799 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2800
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002801- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2802 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002803
2804- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2805 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2806 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2807 #693195.)
2808
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002809- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2810 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002811
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002812- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002813 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002814 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2815 interpreter executions, would fail.
2816
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002817- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002818 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002819 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002820
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002821Extension modules
2822-----------------
2823
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002824- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2825 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2826 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2827 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2828
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002829- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2830 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2831
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002832- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2833 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2834 and Greg Chapman.)
2835
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002836- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2837 recursively.
2838
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002839- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002840 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2841 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2842 leaks.
2843
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002844- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2845
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002846- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2847 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2848 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2849 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2850 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2851 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2852 #705836.
2853
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002854- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002855 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2856
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002857- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2858 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2859 See SF bug #692416.
2860
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002861- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2862 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2863
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002864- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2865 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2866 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002867
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002868- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002869 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2870 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2871
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002872- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2873 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2874 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2875 timeouts to work properly.
2876
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002877Library
2878-------
2879
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002880- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2881 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2882 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2883 future release.
2884
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002885- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2886 for querying platform dependent features.
2887
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002888- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002889
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002890- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2891 pickle protocol versions.
2892
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002893- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2894 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2895 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2896
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002897- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2898
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002899- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2900 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2901 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2902 modules.
2903
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002904- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2905 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2906 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2907
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002908- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2909 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2910
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002911- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2912 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2913 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2914
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002915- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002916 MS Office extensions.
2917
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002918- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2919 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2920
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002921- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2922 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2923
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002924- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2925 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2926 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2927 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2928 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2929 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2930
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002931- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2932 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2933 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002934
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002935- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2936 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2937 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2938
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002939- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2940
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002941- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2942 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2943 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2944
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002945Tools/Demos
2946-----------
2947
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002948- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2949 See the module docstring for details.
2950
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002951Build
2952-----
2953
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002954- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2955 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002956
2957C API
2958-----
2959
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002960- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2961
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002962- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2963 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2964 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2965
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002966- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2967 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002968
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002969 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2970 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2971 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002972
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002973- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002974 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2975
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002976- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2977 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2978 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002979
2980New platforms
2981-------------
2982
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002983None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002984
2985Tests
2986-----
2987
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002988- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2989 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002990
2991Windows
2992-------
2993
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002994- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2995 function.
2996
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002997- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2998 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002999
3000Mac
3001---
3002
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003003- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3004 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003005
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003006- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3007 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003008
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003009- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3010 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3011 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003012
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003013- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003014 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3015 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003016
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003017- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3018 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003019
3020
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003021What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3022=================================
3023
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003024*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003025
3026Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003027-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003028
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003029- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3030 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3031 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3032
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003033- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3034 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3035 (SF patch #664376.)
3036
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003037- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3038 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3039 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3040 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3041 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3042 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003043 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003044
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003045- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3046 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3047 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3048 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003049 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003050
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003051- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3052 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3053 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3054 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3055 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3056 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3057 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3058 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3059 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3060 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3061 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3062
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003063- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3064 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3065 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3066 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3067 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3068 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3069
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003070- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3071 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3072
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003073- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3074 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3075 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3076 case.)
3077
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003078- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3079 passed as unicode strings.
3080
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003081- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3082 See SF bug #683467.
3083
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003084- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3085 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3086
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003087- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3088
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003089- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3090
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003091- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3092 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3093 arguments.
3094
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003095- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3096 See SF bug #667147.
3097
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003098- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003099 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003100 See SF bug #676155.
3101
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003102- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003103 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003104 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3105 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3106 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3107 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3108 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3109 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003110
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003111Extension modules
3112-----------------
3113
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003114- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3115 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3116 tp_as_number pointer.
3117
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003118- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3119 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3120 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3121 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3122 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3123
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003124- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3125
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003126- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3127
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003128- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003129 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003130 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3131 patch #678531.)
3132
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003133- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3134 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3135
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003136- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3137 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3138
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003139- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3140
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003141- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3142 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3143 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3144
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003145- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3146
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003147- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3148 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3149
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003150- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003151
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003152- datetime changes:
3153
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003154 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3155
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003156 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3157 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3158 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3159 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3160 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3161 now.
3162
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003163 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003164 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3165 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003166
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003167 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003168 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003169 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3170 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3171 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3172 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003173
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003174 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3175 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3176 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003177 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3178
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003179 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3180 by a later example coded by Guido.
3181
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003182 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003183 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3184 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3185 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003186 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3187 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3188
3189 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3190 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3191 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3192 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3193 tzinfo subclass instance.
3194
3195 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3196 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3197 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3198 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3199 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3200 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3201 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3202 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003203
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003204 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3205 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3206 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3207 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3208 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003209 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3210
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003211 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003212
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003213 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3214 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3215 as a naive datetime object.
3216
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003217 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3218 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3219 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3220
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003221 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3222 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3223 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3224 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3225 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3226 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3227 comparison.
3228
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003229 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3230 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3231 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3232 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003233 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003234
3235 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003236
3237 and ::
3238
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003239 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3240
3241 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3242 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3243 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3244 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3245
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003246 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3247 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3248 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3249 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3250 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3251
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003252 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3253 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003254 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3255 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003256
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003257Library
3258-------
3259
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003260- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3261 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3262
3263- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3264 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3265 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3266 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3267 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3268 See PEP 307 for details.
3269
3270- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3271 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3272
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003273- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3274 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003275 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003276 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3277 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003278 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003279
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003280- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3281 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3282
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003283- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3284 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3285 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3286
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003287- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3288
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003289- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3290 exception.
3291
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003292- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3293 class.
3294
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003295- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3296 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3297 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3298
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003299- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3300 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3301
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003302- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003303 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3304 See SF bug #659228.
3305
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003306- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3307 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3308 See SF patch #651082.
3309
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003310- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003311
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003312- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3313 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3314
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003315- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003316 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003317
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003318- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3319 DOS paths from other platforms.
3320
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003321Tools/Demos
3322-----------
3323
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003324- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3325 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3326 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3327 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3328 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3329 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3330 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3331 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3332 example:
3333
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003334 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3335 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003336
3337 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3338
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003339
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003340Build
3341-----
3342
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003343- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3344 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3345 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003346 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3347
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003348 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3349
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003350- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3351 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3352 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3353 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3354 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3355 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3356 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3357 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3358 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3359
3360- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3361 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3362 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3363 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3364
3365- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3366 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3367
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003368C API
3369-----
3370
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003371- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3372 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003373
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003374- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3375 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3376 tp_as_number pointer.
3377
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003378- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3379 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3380 (SF #681367)
3381
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003382- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3383 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3384 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3385 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003386
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003387Tests
3388-----
3389
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003390- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003391 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3392 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3393 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3394 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3395 pydoc.)
3396
3397- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3398
3399- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003400
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003401Windows
3402-------
3403
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003404- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3405 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3406 time).
3407
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003408- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3409 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3410
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003411- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3412 release without strong cryptography.
3413
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003414- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003415 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003416
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003417- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3418 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3419
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003420Mac
3421---
3422
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003423- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3424 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003425
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003426- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3427 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3428 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003429
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003430- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3431 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003432
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003433- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3434 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3435 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3436 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003437
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003438- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003439 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3440 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3441 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003442
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003443
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003444What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003445=================================
3446
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003447*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003448
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003449Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003450--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003451
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003452- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3453
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003454- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3455 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003456 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003457 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003458 a different meaning than before.
3459
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003460- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003461 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003462 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003463
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003464- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003465 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003466 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003467
3468- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3469 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3470 and deallocation.
3471
3472- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3473 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3474
3475- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3476 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3477 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3478 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3479 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3480
3481- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3482 now detected by the garbage collector.
3483
3484- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3485 [SF bug 519621]
3486
3487- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3488 identifier.
3489
3490- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3491 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3492 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3493 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3494 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3495 [SF bug 563060]
3496
3497- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3498 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3499 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3500 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3501 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3502
3503- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3504 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3505 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3506
3507- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3508
3509- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3510 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3511 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3512 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3513 state of the slots would be lost.)
3514
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003515Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003516-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003517
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003518- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003519 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3520 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3521 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3522 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003523 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3524 Jython 2.1.
3525
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003526- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003527 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003528 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3529 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3530 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3531 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3532 these, see PEP 302.
3533
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003534- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3535 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3536 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3537
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003538- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3539 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3540 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3541
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003542- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3543 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3544 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3545
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003546- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3547 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3548 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3549 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3550 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3551 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3552 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3553 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3554 releases or implementations.
3555
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003556- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003557 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3558 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003559
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003560- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3561 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3562
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003563- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3564 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3565 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3566
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003567- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3568 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3569
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003570- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3571 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003572 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3573 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003574
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003575- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3576 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3577 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3578 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3579 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3580
3581 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3582 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3583 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3584 pattern.
3585
3586 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3587 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3588 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3589 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3590
3591 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3592 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3593 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3594 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3595 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3596 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3597
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003598- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3599 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3600 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3601 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3602 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3603 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3604 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3605 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003606
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003607- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3608 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3609 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3610 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3611 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003612 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3613 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3614 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3615 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3616 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3617 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3618 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003619
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003620- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3621 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3622
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003623- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3624 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3625 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3626 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3627 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3628 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3629 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3630 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3631 to Zack Weinberg!
3632
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003633- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3634 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3635 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3636 type. This has been fixed now.
3637
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003638- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3639 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3640 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3641
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003642- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3643 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3644 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3645 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3646 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3647 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3648 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3649 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003650 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003651
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003652- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3653 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3654 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003655
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003656- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3657 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3658 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3659 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3660 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3661 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3662 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3663 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003664 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003665 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3666 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3667
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003668- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3669 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3670 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3671 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3672 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3673 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3674 this.)
3675
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003676- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3677 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003678 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003679 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003680 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3681 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003682 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3683 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003684
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003685- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3686 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3687 currently running.
3688
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003689- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3690 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3691 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3692 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3693
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003694- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3695 as directory names.
3696
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003697- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3698 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3699
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003700- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3701 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3702
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003703- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003704 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3705 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003706
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003707- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3708 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3709 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3710 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3711 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3712
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003713- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3714 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3715 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3716 removed.
3717
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003718- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3719 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3720 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3721
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003722- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3723 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3724 to __debug__.
3725
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003726- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3727 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3728 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3729
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003730- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3731 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3732 deprecated now.
3733
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003734- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3735 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3736 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003737
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003738- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3739 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3740 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3741 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3742 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003743
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003744- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3745 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3746
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003747- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3748 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3749 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003750 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003751 is backward compatible.
3752
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003753- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3754 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3755 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3756 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3757 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3758
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003759- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3760 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3761 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3762 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3763 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3764 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003765
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003766- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3767 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3768
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003769- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3770 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3771
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003772- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3773 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3774 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3775 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3776 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3777
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003778- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3779 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3780 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3781
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003782- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003783 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3784
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003785- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3786 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3787 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003788
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003789- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3790 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3791
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003792- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3793 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3794 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3795
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003796- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3797
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003798Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003799-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003800
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003801- Added three operators to the operator module:
3802 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3803 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3804 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3805
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003806- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3807
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003808- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3809 archives.
3810
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003811- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3812 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3813 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3814
3815 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3816
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003817- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3818 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3819 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003820 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003821
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003822- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3823 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3824 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3825 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003826 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3827 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3828 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3829 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003830
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003831- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3832 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003833
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003834- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3835
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003836- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3837 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3838
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003839- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3840 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3841 supported.
3842
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003843- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3844
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003845- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3846 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003847
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003848- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3849 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3850
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003851- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3852
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003853- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3854 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3855
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003856- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3857 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3858 functions but callable type objects.
3859
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003860- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003861 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003862 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003863
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003864- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3865 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003866
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003867- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3868 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003869
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003870- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3871 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3872 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3873 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3874
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003875- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3876 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003877
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003878- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3879 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3880 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3881 and __imul__.
3882
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003883- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003884 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3885 is called.
3886
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003887- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3888 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3889 interpreter was compiled.
3890
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003891- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3892 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3893 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003894 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003895 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3896 1, not 2.
3897
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003898- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3899 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3900 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3901 limit.
3902
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003903- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3904 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3905 bug #623464.
3906
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003907- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3908 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3909 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3910 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3911
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003912Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003913-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003914
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003915- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3916
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003917- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3918 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3919 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3920 with Python 2.3a2.
3921
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003922- os.path exposes getctime.
3923
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003924- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003925 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003926 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003927 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003928 unit tests of floating point results.
3929
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003930- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3931 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3932 has been increased.
3933
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003934- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3935 executed.
3936
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003937- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3938 postinstallation script.
3939
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003940- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3941 test the current module.
3942
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003943- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003944 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3945 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3946 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3947 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3948
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003949- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003950 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003951 Ward's Optik package.
3952
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003953- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3954 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3955 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3956 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3957
3958- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3959 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003960 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003961
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003962- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3963 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3964 shelf are binary pickles.
3965
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003966- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3967 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3968
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003969- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3970 modules are iterators now.
3971
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003972- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3973 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3974 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3975 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3976 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3977 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003978
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003979- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3980 with their entity value.
3981
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003982- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3983
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003984- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3985 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003986
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003987- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3988 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003989 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003990
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003991- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3992 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3993 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3994 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3995 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3996 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3997 main():
3998
3999 import locale
4000 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4001
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004002- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4003 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4004
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004005- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4006 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4007 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4008 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4009 to the new standard.
4010
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004011- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4012 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4013 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4014 an extension to the database.
4015
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004016- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4017 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4018 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4019 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004020 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004021
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004022- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004023 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004024
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004025- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4026 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4027 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4028 bounded integers.
4029
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004030- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4031 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4032 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4033 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4034 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4035 in existence.
4036
4037 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4038 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4039 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4040 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4041 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4042 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4043
4044 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4045 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4046 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4047 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4048
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004049- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4050 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4051 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4052
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004053- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4054
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004055- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4056 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4057 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4058 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4059
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004060- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4061 argument.
4062
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004063- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4064 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4065 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4066 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4067 [SF patch 560794].
4068
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004069- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4070 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4071 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004072 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4073 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4074 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004075
4076- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4077 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004078
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004079- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4080 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4081 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4082 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004083
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004084- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4085 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4086 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4087 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4088 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4089
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004090- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004091
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004092- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4093
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004094- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4095 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4096 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4097 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4098 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4099 identical to None.
4100
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004101- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4102 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4103 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4104 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4105 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4106 results now.
4107
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004108- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4109 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4110
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004111- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4112 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4113 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4114 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4115 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4116 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4117 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4118 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4119
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004120- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4121
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004122- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4123 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4124
4125- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4126 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4127 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4128 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4129 and other systems.
4130
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004131- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4132 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4133 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4134 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 +00004135 work well with these.
4136
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004137- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4138
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004139- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004140 connections.
4141
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004142- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4143 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4144 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4145
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004146- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4147 sets
4148
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004149- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4150 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4151 name.
4152
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004153- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4154 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4155 passed in.
4156
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004157- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004158 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004159 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4160 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004161
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004162- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4163
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004164- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4165
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004166- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4167 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4168 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4169
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004170- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4171 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4172 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4173 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004174 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004175
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004176- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004177 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004178 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004179
4180- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4181 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4182 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4183
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004184- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004185 the value of its expression argument.
4186
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004187- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4188 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4189 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4190
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004191- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4192 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4193 skipstone browser was included.
4194
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004195- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4196 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4197
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004198Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004199-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004200
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004201- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4202 names in addition to accepting file names.
4203
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004204- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4205 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4206 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4207 still used and useful.)
4208
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004209- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4210 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4211 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4212 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004213
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004214- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4215 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4216 the generated binary.
4217
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004218Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004219-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004220
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004221- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4222
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004223- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4224 except in the hands of experts.
4225
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004226- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004227 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4228 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4229 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004230
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004231- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4232 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4233 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4234 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4235 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4236 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4237 builds.
4238
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004239- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4240 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4241 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4242 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4243 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4244 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4245 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4246 new type.
4247
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004248- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004249
4250 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4251 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4252 positive infinities.
4253
4254 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4255 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4256 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4257 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4258 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4259 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4260 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4261
4262 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4263
4264 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4265
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004266- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4267 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4268 size of the executable.
4269
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004270- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4271 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4272 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4273 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004274
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004275- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4276
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004277- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4278 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4279 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004280
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004281- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4282 well as Unix.
4283
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004284- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4285 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4286 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4287 modules in the README file for details.
4288
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004289C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004290-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004291
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004292- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4293 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004294 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004295 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004296 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004297
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004298- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4299 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4300 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4301 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4302 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4303 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004304 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004305 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4306 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4307 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4308 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4309 aligned.)
4310
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004311- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4312 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4313 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4314
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004315- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4316 level.
4317
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004318- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4319 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4320 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4321 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4322 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4323
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004324- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4325 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4326 code.
4327
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004328- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4329 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4330 adjusting for negative indices.
4331
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004332- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4333 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4334 object.
4335
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004336- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4337 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4338 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4339
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004340- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4341 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004342
4343- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4344
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004345- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4346 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4347 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4348 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4349
4350- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4351
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004352- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004353
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004354- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004355 without going through the buffer API.
4356
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004357- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004358
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004359- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4360 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4361 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4362 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4363
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004364- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4365 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4366
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004367- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004368 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4369
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004370New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004371-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004372
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004373- OpenVMS is now supported.
4374
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004375- AtheOS is now supported.
4376
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004377- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4378
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004379- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4380
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004381Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004382-----
4383
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004384- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4385 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4386 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004387
4388Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004389-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004390
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004391- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4392 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4393 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4394 bugs.
4395 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004396 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004397 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4398 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004399 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004400
4401- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004402 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004403
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004404- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4405 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4406
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004407- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4408 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004409 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004410 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4411
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004412- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4413 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4414 use files" uninstall option).
4415
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004416- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4417
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004418- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4419 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4420
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004421- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4422 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4423 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4424
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004425- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4426 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4427 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4428 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4429 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004430 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4431 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4432 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004433
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004434- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004435 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004436 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4437 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4438 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4439 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4440 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4441 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4442 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4443 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4444 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4445 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4446 work around.
4447
4448- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4449 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4450 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4451 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4452 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4453 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4454 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4455 specified with O_CREAT too).
4456
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004457Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004458----
4459
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004460- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004461
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004462- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4463 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4464 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4465
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004466- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4467 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4468 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4469
4470- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4471 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4472 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4473 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4474 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4475 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4476 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4477 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004478
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004479- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4480 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4481 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004482
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004483- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4484 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4485 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4486 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4487 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004488
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004489- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4490 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4491 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004492
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004493- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4494 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004495
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004496- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4497 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4498 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4499 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4500 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004501
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004502- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4503 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4504 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4505
4506- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4507 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4508 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004509
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004510- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4511 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4512 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4513 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004514 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004515
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004516- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4517 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004518
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004519- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4520 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004521
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004522- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004523 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004524 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4525 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004526
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004527
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004528What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004529===============================
4530
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004531*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4532
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004533Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004534--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004535
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004536- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4537 with a custom metaclass.
4538
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004539Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004540-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004541
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004542- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4543 are proxies.
4544
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004545Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004546-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004547
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004548- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4549 very short strings.
4550
4551- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4552 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4553 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4554 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4555 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4556
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004557Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004558-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004559
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004560- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4561 close or delete time).
4562
4563- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4564 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4565
4566- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4567
4568- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004569 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004570
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004571Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004572-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004573
4574Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004575-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004576
4577C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004578-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004579
4580New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004581-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004582
4583Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004584-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004585
4586Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004587-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004588
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004589- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4590
4591- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4592 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4593
4594- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4595 deleted at process exit time.
4596
4597- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4598 in backslash.
4599
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004600Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004601----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004602
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004603- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4604 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4605 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4606
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004607
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004608What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004609===========================
4610
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004611*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4612
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004613Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004614--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004615
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004616- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4617 been extensively updated. See
4618
4619 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4620
4621 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4622
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004623- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4624 deleted!
4625
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004626- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4627 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4628 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4629 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4630 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4631
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004632- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4633
4634 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4635 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4636
4637 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4638 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4639 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4640 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4641 supported anyway.
4642
4643 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4644 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4645
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004646- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4647 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4648 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4649 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4650 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004651
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004652- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4653 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4654 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4655
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004656Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004657-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004658
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004659- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4660 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4661 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4662 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4663 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4664 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004665 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4666 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4667 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4668 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004669
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004670- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4671 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4672 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4673
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004674Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004675-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004676
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004677- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4678
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004679Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004680-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004681
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004682- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4683 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4684 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4685 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4686 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4687 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4688
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004689- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4690
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004691- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4692
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004693- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4694
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004695- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4696 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4697 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4698
4699- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4700
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004701Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004702-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004703
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004704- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4705 off a search on Google.
4706
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004707Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004708-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004709
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004710- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4711 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4712 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4713 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4714 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4715 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4716 other platforms should do likewise.
4717
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004718- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4719 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4720 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4721
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004722C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004723-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004724
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004725- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4726 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4727 producing key-value pairs.
4728
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004729- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004730 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004731 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4732 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4733 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4734 previously went unchallenged.
4735
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004736New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004737-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004738
4739Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004740-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004741
4742Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004743-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004744
4745Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004746----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004747
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004748- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4749 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004750
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004751- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4752 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4753 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4754 home.
4755
4756
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004757What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004758===========================
4759
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004760*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4761
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004762Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004763--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004764
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004765- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4766 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004767
4768 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004769 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004770
4771 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4772 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004773 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004774 This needs to be documented.
4775
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004776- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4777 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4778
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004779- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4780 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4781 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4782
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004783- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4784 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4785
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004786- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4787 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4788 class forbids it).
4789
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004790- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4791 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4792 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4793
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004794- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4795
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004796Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004797-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004798
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004799- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4800 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004801 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004802
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004803- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4804 (like 1 + '').
4805
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004806Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004807-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004808
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004809- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4810 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4811 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4812 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004813 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004814 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4815
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004816- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4817 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4818 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4819 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4820
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004821- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4822 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004823 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4824 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4825 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004826
4827- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4828 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004829
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004830- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4831 bytes on its input.
4832
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004833Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004834-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004835
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004836- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004837 convenience function.
4838
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004839- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4840 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4841 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004842 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4843 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4844 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4845 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4846 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4847 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004848
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004849- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4850 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4851 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4852 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4853
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004854- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4855 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4856 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4857
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004858- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4859 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4860 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4861 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4862
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004863- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4864 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004865 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004866 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4867 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4868 new -l and -e options.
4869
4870- statcache is now deprecated.
4871
4872- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4873 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004874 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004875 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4876 time properly taken into account.
4877
4878- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4879 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4880 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4881 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4882
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004883Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004884-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004885
4886Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004887-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004888
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004889- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4890 is built with libdb3 if available.
4891
4892- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4893
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004894C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004895-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004896
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004897- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4898 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4899 PySequence_Size().
4900
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004901- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4902
4903- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4904 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4905 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4906
4907- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4908 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4909
4910- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4911 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4912
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004913New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004914-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004915
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004916- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4917 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4918
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004919- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4920 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4921
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004922- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4923
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004924Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004925-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004926
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004927- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4928 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4929
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004930Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004931-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004932
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004933Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004934----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004935
4936- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4937 removed completely in the next release.
4938
4939- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4940 OSX.
4941
4942- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4943 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4944
4945- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4946
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004947
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004948What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004949===========================
4950
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004951*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4952
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004953Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004954--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004955
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004956- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004957 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004958 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004959 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4960 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004961 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4962 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004963 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4964 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004965
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004966- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4967 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4968
4969- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4970 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4971
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004972Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004973-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004974
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004975- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4976 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4977 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4978 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4979 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4980 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4981 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4982 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4983
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004984- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4985 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4986 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4987 example).
4988
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004989- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004990 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004991 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004992 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004993
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004994- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4995 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4996 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004997 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004998
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004999- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5000 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5001 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5002 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5003 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5004 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5005
5006 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5007
5008 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5009
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005010Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005011-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005012
5013- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5014
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005015- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5016
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005017- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5018 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005019
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005020- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5021 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5022 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5023 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5024 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5025 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005026 attributes.
5027
5028- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5029 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5030 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005031
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005032- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5033 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5034 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005035
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005036- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5037 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5038 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005039 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5040 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5041
5042- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5043 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005044
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005045Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005046-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005047
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005048- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5049 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5050
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005051- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5052 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5053 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5054 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5055
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005056- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5057 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5058 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5059 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5060
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005061 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5062 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5063 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5064 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5065 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5066 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5067 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5068 without losing information).
5069
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005070- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005071 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5072 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5073 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5074 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5075 module).
5076
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005077 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005078 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5079 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5080 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5081 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005082
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005083- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005084 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5085 encoding.
5086
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005087- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5088 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5089
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005090- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005091 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5092
5093- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5094 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5095 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5096 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5097
5098- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5099
5100- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5101 ON, and OFF.
5102
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005103- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5104 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5105
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005106Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005107-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005108
5109- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5110 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5111 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005112
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005113- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5114 been added: -X and -E.
5115
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005116Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005117-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005118
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005119- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5120 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5121
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005122C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005123-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005124
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005125- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5126 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5127 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5128 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5129 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5130
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005131- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5132 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5133 as long) arguments.
5134
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005135- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5136 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5137 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5138 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5139 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5140 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5141
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005142- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5143 input.
5144
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005145New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005146-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005147
5148Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005149-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005150
5151Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005152-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005153
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005154- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5155 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5156 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5157
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005158- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5159 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5160 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005161 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005162
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005163 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5164 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5165 import signal
5166 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005167
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005168 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005169 while 1:
5170 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005171 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005172 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5173 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5174 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5175 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005176
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005177
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005178What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5179===========================
5180
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005181*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5182
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005183Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005184--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005185
5186- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5187 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5188 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5189
5190- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5191 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5192 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5193 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5194 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5195 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5196 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005197
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005198- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005199 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005200 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5201 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5202 associate a docstring with a property.
5203
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005204- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5205 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5206 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5207 other built-in object types.
5208
5209- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5210 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5211 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5212 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5213 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5214
5215- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5216 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5217
5218- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5219 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005220 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005221 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5222 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5223 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5224 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5225 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5226
5227- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5228 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5229 class.
5230
5231- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5232 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5233 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5234 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5235
5236- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5237 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5238 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5239 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5240
5241- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5242 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5243
5244- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5245 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5246 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5247 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5248 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005249 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005250 with the same value as s.
5251
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005252- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5253
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005254Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005255----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005256
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005257- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5258
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005259- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5260 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5261 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5262 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5263 objects.
5264
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005265- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5266 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005267 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5268 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5269
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005270- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5271 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5272 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5273
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005274Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005275-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005276
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005277- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5278 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5279 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5280 by the instances.
5281
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005282- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5283 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5284 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5285
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005286- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5287 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5288 before the entire comparison is complete.
5289
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005290- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5291 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5292 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5293
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005294- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5295 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5296 getwriter().
5297
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005298- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5299 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5300
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005301- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005302 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5303 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5304
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005305- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5306 iterable object.
5307
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005308- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5309 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005310
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005311- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5312 authentication.
5313
5314- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5315 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005316
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005317- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005318 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5319 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5320 a sample driver.)
5321
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005322Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005323-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005324
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005325- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5326 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5327 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5328 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5329 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5330 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5331 kernel has large file support.
5332
5333- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5334 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5335 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5336 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5337 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5338
5339- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5340 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5341 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5342
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005343C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005344-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005345
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005346- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5347 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5348
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005349New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005350-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005351
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005352- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5353 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5354
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005355Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005356-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005357
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005358- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5359 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5360 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5361 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5362 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5363
5364- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5365 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5366 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5367 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5368
5369- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5370 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5371
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005372Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005373-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005374
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005375- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005376 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5377 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005378
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005379
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005380What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5381===========================
5382
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005383*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5384
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005385Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005386----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005387
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005388- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5389 big to represent as a C double.
5390
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005391- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5392 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5393 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5394 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5395 restriction).
5396
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005397- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5398 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5399 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5400 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5401 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5402
5403 >>> dir([])
5404 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5405 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5406 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5407 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5408 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5409 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5410 'reverse', 'sort']
5411
5412 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5413
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005414- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005415 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5416 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5417 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5418 OverflowError exception.
5419
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005420- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005421 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005422 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5423 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5424 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5425 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5426 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005427 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005428 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5429 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5430
5431 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5432 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5433 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5434 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005435
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005436- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005437 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5438 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5439 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5440 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5441 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5442 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5443 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5444 once it is created.
5445
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005446- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5447 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5448 (key, value) pairs.
5449
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005450- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005451 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5452 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5453
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005454- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5455 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5456 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5457 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5458 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005459
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005460- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005461 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5462 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5463
5464 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5465
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005466- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005467 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5468
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005469Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005470-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005471
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005472- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005473 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5474 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005475
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005476- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5477 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5478 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5479 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5480 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5481 in this area anymore).
5482
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005483- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5484 threading.Timer.
5485
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005486- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5487 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5488
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005489- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005490 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5491
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005492- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005493 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5494 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5495 converted to Python longs.
5496
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005497- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005498 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5499
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005500- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5501 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5502 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5503
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005504Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005505-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005506
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005507- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5508 division operators as per PEP 238.
5509
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005510Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005511-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005512
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005513- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5514 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5515 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5516 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5517
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005518C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005519-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005520
5521- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005522
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005523- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5524 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005525 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005526
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005527 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5528 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005529 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005530 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005531
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005532- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005533 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5534 module:
5535
5536 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005537
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005538 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5539 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005540
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005541 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5542 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005543
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005544 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5545
5546 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5547
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005548- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005549 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5550 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5551 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005552
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005553New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005554-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005555
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005556- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5557 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5558 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5559 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5560 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005561
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005562Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005563-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005564
5565Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005566-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005567
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005568- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5569 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5570 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5571 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005572 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5573 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5574 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5575 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5576 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005577
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005578- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005579 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5580
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005581
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005582What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5583===========================
5584
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005585*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5586
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005587Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005588-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005589
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005590- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5591 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5592
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005593- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5594 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5595 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005596
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005597- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5598 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5599 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5600 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005601
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005602- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5603
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005604- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005605
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005606Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005607-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005608
5609- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005610 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005611 the module docstring for details.
5612
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005613Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005614-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005615
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005616- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005617 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5618 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5619 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005620
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005621- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5622 Nick Mathewson.
5623
5624Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005625----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005626
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005627- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5628 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5629 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5630 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5631 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5632 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5633 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5634 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5635
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005636- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5637 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5638 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5639 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5640
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005641- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5642 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5643 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5644 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5645 come a long way).
5646
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005647- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5648 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5649 write filters for these warnings).
5650
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005651- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5652 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5653 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5654 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5655 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5656
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005657- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5658 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5659 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5660 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5661 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5662 older distribution.
5663
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005664Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005665-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005666
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005667- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5668 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005669 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005670
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005671- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5672 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5673 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5674
5675- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5676
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005677- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5678
5679- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5680
5681- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5682
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005683- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005684
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005685- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5686
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005687New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005688-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005689
5690C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005691-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005692
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005693- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5694 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5695 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5696 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5697 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5698 against buffer overruns.
5699
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005700- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005701 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5702 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005703 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5704 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5705 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5706
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005707- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5708 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5709 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5710 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5711 deprecated.
5712
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005713Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005714-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005715
5716- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5717 relevant is found.
5718
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005719
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005720What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005721===========================
5722
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005723*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5724
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005725Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005726----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005727
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005728- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5729 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5730 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5731 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5732 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5733 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5734 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5735 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005736 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005737 repaired.
5738
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005739- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005740 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005741 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5742 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5743 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5744 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5745 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5746 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5747 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5748 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5749
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005750- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5751 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5752 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5753 leading BMO character).
5754
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005755- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5756 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5757 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5758
5759 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5760 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5761 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005762
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005763 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5764 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5765 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5766 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5767 for various simple to use conversions.
5768
5769 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5770 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5771
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005772 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5773 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5774 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5775 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5776 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5777 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5778 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5779 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5780 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5781 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5782 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5783 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5784 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5785 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5786 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005787
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005788- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5789 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5790 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005791 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005792 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005793
5794 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005795 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5796 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5797 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5798 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5799 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005800 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5801 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005802
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005803 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5804 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5805 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005806 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005807
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005808- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5809 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5810 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5811 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5812 floating arithmetic,
5813
5814 x = 9007199254740992.0
5815 print long(x)
5816
5817 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5818 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5819 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5820 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5821 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5822 functions are of good quality).
5823
5824 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5825 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5826 algorithms to break.
5827
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005828- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5829 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5830 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5831 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5832 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5833 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5834 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5835 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5836 order.
5837
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005838- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5839 operation along the most common code paths.
5840
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005841- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5842 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5843
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005844- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5845 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5846 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5847 {}.update(UserDict())
5848
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005849- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5850 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5851 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5852 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5853 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5854 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5855 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5856 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5857
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005858- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005859 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005860
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005861 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005862 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5863 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005864 join() method of strings
5865 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005866 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5867 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005868 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005869 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005870
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005871- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5872 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5873
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005874- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5875 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5876
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005877- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5878 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5879 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5880 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5881
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005882- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5883 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005884 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005885 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5886 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005887
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005888- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5889
5890
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005891Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005892-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005893
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005894- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005895 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005896 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5897 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5898
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005899- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5900 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5901
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005902- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5903 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5904 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5905 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5906
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005907- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5908 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5909 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5910
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005911- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5912
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005913- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5914
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005915- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5916 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5917 that are still imported into string.py).
5918
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005919- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5920
5921- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5922 Now it does.
5923
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005924- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5925
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005926- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5927 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5928 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5929 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5930 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005931 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5932 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005933
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005934- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5935 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5936 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5937 'help(object)'.
5938
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005939Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005940-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005941
5942- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005943 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005944 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5945 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5946
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005947- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005948 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5949 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005950
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005951C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005952-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005953
5954- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5955 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005956
5957----
5958
5959**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**