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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +000015- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
16 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so:
17 @staticmethod
18 def foo(bar):
19 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect this XXX before 2.4a2)
20
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +000021- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
22 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
23 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
24 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
25 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
26 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
27 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
28 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
29 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
30 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
31 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
32
33 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
34 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
35 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
36 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
37 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
38 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
39 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
40
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +000041- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
42 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
43
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000044- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000045 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000046
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000047- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000048 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000049 which was missing for no apparent reason.
50
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000051- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000052 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
53 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
54
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +000055- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
56 types that support garbage collection.
57
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +000058- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
59
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +000060- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
61 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
62 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
63 Jython.
64
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +000065- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
66
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000067Extension modules
68-----------------
69
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +000070- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
71
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000072Library
73-------
74
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +000075- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
76
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +000077- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
78 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
79 same as when the argument is omitted).
80 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
81
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +000082- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
83
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +000084- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
85 schemes are offered.
86
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +000087- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
88
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +000089- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
90 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
91 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
92
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +000093- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
94
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +000095- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
96 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
97
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +000098- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
99 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
100 when dummy_threading is being used.
101
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000102- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
103 from a tarfile.
104
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000105- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000106 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000107
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000108- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
109 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
110 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
111 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
112
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000113- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
114 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
115
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000116- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
117 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
118 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
119 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
120 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
121 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
122 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
123 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
124 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
125 by some other method in progress).
126
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000127- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
128 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
129 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000130
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000131- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
132
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000133- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
134 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
135 AM Kuchling.
136
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000137- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
138 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
139 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
140
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000141- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
142 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
143 instead of unsigned.
144
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000145- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000146 no longer part of the public API.
147
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000148- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
149 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
150 string methods of the same name).
151
Andrew M. Kuchling64ed2982004-07-10 18:43:32 +0000152- asyncore's dispatcher.set_reuse_addr() now works correctly on Windows.
153 SF patch 982681.
154
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000155- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000156 SF patch 945642.
157
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000158- doctest unittest integration improvements:
159
160 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
161
162 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
163 DocTestSuites.
164
165- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
166 that provide thread-local data.
167
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000168- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
169 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
170
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000171- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
172
173- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
174 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
175 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
176
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000177- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
178
179 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
180 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
181 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000182
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000183 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
184 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
185 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
186 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
187
188 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
189 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
190
191 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
192 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
193 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
194 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
195
196 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
197 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
198 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
199 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
200 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
201
202 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
203 wrapping help output.
204
205 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
206 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
207 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000208
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000209Tools/Demos
210-----------
211
212Build
213-----
214
215C API
216-----
217
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000218- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
219 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
220 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
221 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
222 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
223 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
224 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
225 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
226 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
227 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
228 its visible semantics have not changed.
229
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000230- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
231 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
232
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000233Documentation
234-------------
235
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000236- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000237
238 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
239 assigning thier values
240
241 - correct my missconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
242
243 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
244
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000245- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000246
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000247New platforms
248-------------
249
250Tests
251-----
252
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000253- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000254 platforms that use the Makefile.
255
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000256- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
257 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
258 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
259
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000260Windows
261-------
262
263Mac
264---
265
266
267
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000268What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
269=================================
270
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000271*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000272
273Core and builtins
274-----------------
275
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000276- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
277 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
278 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
279 objects now (one object instead of three).
280
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000281- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
282 Windows DLLs.
283
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000284- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
285 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000286
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000287- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
288 a new .pyc magic.
289
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000290- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
291 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
292 be there.
293
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000294- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
295 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
296 the LC_NUMERIC category.
297
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000298- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
299 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
300 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
301
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000302- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
303
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000304- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
305 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
306 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000307
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000308- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
309 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
310
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000311- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
312
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000313- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000314 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000315
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000316- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
317
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000318- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
319
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000320- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
321 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
322
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000323- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
324 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
325 Fixes bug #858016 .
326
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000327- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
328 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
329 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
330
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000331- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
332 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
333 improves their performance (about 35%).
334
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000335- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
336 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
337 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
338
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000339- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
340 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
341 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
342 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
343
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000344- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
345 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
346 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
347 length is not known).
348
349- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
350 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000351 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
352 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000353 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
354
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000355- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
356 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
357
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000358- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
359 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
360 keyword arguments.
361
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000362- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
363 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
364 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
365
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000366- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
367 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
368 cases.
369
370- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
371 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
372 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
373 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
374 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
375 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
376 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
377 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
378 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
379 a release build.
380
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000381- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
382 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
383
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000384- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000385 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000386
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000387- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
388 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
389 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
390 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
391 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
392 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
393 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
394 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
395 destroyed.
396
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000397- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
398 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
399 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
400 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
401 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
402 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
403 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
404 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
405
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000406- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
407 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
408 character other than a space.
409
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000410- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
411 by the function object or by the method object, the function
412 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
413 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
414 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
415 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
416 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
417 attributes with the same name.
418
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000419- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
420 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
421 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
422 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
423 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
424 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
425 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
426 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
427 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
428 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
429 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
430 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
431 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
432 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000433
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000434- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
435 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
436 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
437 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
438 This has been repaired.
439
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000440- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
441
442- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
443
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000444- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
445 over a sequence.
446
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000447- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000448 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000449
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000450- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
451
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000452- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
453 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
454 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
455 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
456 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
457 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
458 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
459 records with equal keys is unchanged).
460
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000461- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
462 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
463 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
464
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000465- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
466 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
467 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
468 freelist.
469
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000470- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
471 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
472
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000473- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
474 number.
475
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000476- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
477 a TypeError exception.
478
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000479- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
480 820195.
481
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000482- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
483 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
484 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
485
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000486- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000487 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
488 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000489
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000490- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
491 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
492 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
493
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000494- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
495 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000496 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000497
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000498- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000499 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
500 the first call.
501
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000502
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000503Extension modules
504-----------------
505
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000506- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
507 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
508
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000509- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
510 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
511 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
512 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
513 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
514 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
515 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000516
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000517- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
518
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000519- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
520
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000521- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
522 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
523
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000524- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
525 fewer false positives.
526
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000527- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
528 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
529
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000530- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000531 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
532
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000533- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000534 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000535 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
536 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
537 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000538
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000539- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
540 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
541 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
542 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
543
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000544- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
545 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
546 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
547 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
548 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
549 #897625.
550
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000551- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
552 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
553
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000554- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
555 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
556 and pops on either side of the deque.
557
558- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
559 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
560
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000561- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
562 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
563 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
564 other functions that expect a function argument.
565
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000566- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
567
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000568- os.getsid was added.
569
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000570- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
571 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
572 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
573
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000574- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
575
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000576- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
577
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000578- readline.clear_history was added.
579
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000580- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
581
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000582- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
583
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000584- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
585
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000586- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
587
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000588- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
589
590- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
591
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000592- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
593
594- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
595
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000596- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
597 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
598 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
599
600- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
601 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
602 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
603 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
604 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
605 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
606 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
607
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000608- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
609 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
610 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
611 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000612
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000613- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000614 iterators from a single iterable.
615
616- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
617 of raising a TypeError exception.
618
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000619- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
620 as parameter.
621
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000622Library
623-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000624
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000625- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
626 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
627 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000628
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000629- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
630 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
631 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000632
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000633- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000634
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000635- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
636 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000637
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000638- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
639 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
640
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000641- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
642
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000643- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000644 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000645
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000646- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
647 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
648
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000649- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
650
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000651- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
652 on cygwin and mingw32.
653
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000654- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
655
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000656- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
657 module.
658
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000659- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
660 installation scheme for all platforms.
661
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000662- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000663 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000664
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000665- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
666 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
667 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
668
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000669- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
670 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
671 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
672
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000673- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
674
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000675- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
676
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000677- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
678 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
679
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000680- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
681 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
682 type pattern with the same value exists.
683
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000684- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
685 when run from the command prompt).
686
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000687- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
688 not taken into consideration when caching value.
689
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000690- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
691 default sort).
692
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000693- Added global runctx function to profile module
694
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000695- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
696
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000697- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
698
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000699- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
700
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000701- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000702 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
703 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
704 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
705 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
706 accordingly.
707
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000708- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
709 decoding standards.
710
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000711- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
712 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
713 called for all requests.
714
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000715- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
716 they are passed to the compiler.
717
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000718- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
719 indent, width and depth.
720
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000721- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
722 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
723
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000724- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
725 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
726
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000727- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
728
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000729- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
730
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000731- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
732
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000733- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
734 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
735
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000736- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000737 for better performance.
738
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000739- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000740
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000741- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
742 a string).
743
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000744- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
745
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000746- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
747
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000748- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
749
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000750- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
751
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000752- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
753 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
754 list of fieldnames.
755
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000756- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
757 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
758
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000759- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
760
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000761- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
762 empty lists.
763
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000764- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
765 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
766 and shelves.
767
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000768- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
769 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
770
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000771- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000772 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
773 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000774
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000775- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
776 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000777 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000778
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000779- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000780 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
781 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
782
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000783- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
784 and removed in Py2.4.
785
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000786- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
787
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000788- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
789
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000790Tools/Demos
791-----------
792
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000793- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
794 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
795
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000796- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
797
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000798- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
799 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
800 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
801 destination in situations where both files are given.
802
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000803- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
804 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
805 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
806 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
807
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000808- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
809
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000810- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
811 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
812 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
813 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
814 now.
815
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000816- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
817 in effect
818
819- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
820 C-c C-h
821
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000822- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
823 -d option was given.
824
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000825Build
826-----
827
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000828- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
829 build under OS X.
830
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000831- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
832 --enable-profiling.
833
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000834- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
835 is configured --with-tsc.
836
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000837- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
838 on AMD64.
839
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000840- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
841 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
842
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000843- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
844 removed.
845
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000846- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
847 supported (see PEP 11).
848
849- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
850
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000851- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
852
853- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
854 (see PEP 11).
855
856- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
857 sizeof(char) must be 1.
858
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000859C API
860-----
861
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000862- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
863 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
864 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
865
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000866- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
867 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
868 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
869 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
870
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000871- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
872 generator objects.
873
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000874- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
875 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000876 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
877 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000878
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000879- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
880 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
881
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000882- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
883 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
884 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
885 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
886 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
887
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000888- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
889 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
890 about 10% faster.
891
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000892- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
893 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
894
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000895- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
896 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
897 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
898 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
899
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000900Windows
901-------
902
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000903- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
904 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
905 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
906 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
907
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000908- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
909 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
910 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
911
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000912
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000913What's New in Python 2.3 final?
914===============================
915
916*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
917
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000918IDLE
919----
920
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000921- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
922 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
923 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
924 context-menu actions.
925
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000926- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
927 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
928 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
929 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
930 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
931 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
932 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
933 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
934 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
935
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000936
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000937What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
938=============================================
939
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000940*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000941
942Core and builtins
943-----------------
944
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000945- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000946 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000947 comment at the end are still unsupported.
948
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000949Extension modules
950-----------------
951
952- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
953 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
954 than once. This has been fixed.
955
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000956- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
957 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
958 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
959 call.
960
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000961- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
962
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000963Library
964-------
965
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000966- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
967 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
968
969- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
970 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
971 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
972 restored.
973
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000974IDLE
975----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000976
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000977- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000978
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000979Build
980-----
981
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000982- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
983 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
984
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000985C API
986-----
987
988Windows
989-------
990
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000991- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
992 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
993
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000994- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
995
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000996Mac
997---
998
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000999- Various fixes to pimp.
1000
1001- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1002
1003- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1004 more problems than it solves.
1005
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001006
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001007What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1008=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001009
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001010*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1011
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001012Core and builtins
1013-----------------
1014
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001015- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1016 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1017
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001018- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1019 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001020 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001021
1022- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1023 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1024 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001025 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001026
1027- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1028 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001029
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001030- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1031 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1032 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1033
1034- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001035 770247.
1036
1037- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001038
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001039Extension modules
1040-----------------
1041
1042- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1043 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1044
1045- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1046
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001047- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1048
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001049- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1050 contained within the _strptime module.
1051
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001052- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1053 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1054
1055- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001056 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1057
1058- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1059 the find_class attribute, if present.
1060
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001061- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001062
1063 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1064 (SF bug 763298).
1065
1066 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001067 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1068 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1069 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001070
1071 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1072
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001073Library
1074-------
1075
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001076- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1077
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001078- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1079 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1080 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1081 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1082 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1083 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1084 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1085 or Tester().
1086
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001087- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1088 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1089 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1090 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1091 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1092 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1093 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1094 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1095 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001096
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001097 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001098
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001099- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1100 weren't before was an oversight.
1101
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001102- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1103 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1104
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001105- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1106 when there are no lines.
1107
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001108- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1109 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1110
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001111- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1112 to child processes.
1113
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001114- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1115
1116- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1117
1118- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1119 xmlrpclib.
1120
1121- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1122 responses.
1123
1124- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1125 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1126
1127- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1128 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1129 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1130
1131- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1132 used as patterns.
1133
1134- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1135 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1136 than Tk 8.3.
1137
1138- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1139
1140- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001141
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001142Tools/Demos
1143-----------
1144
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001145- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1146
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001147- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1148
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001149- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001150
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001151Build
1152-----
1153
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001154- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1155
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001156- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1157
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001158- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1159 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001160
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001161- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1162 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1163 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001164
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001165C API
1166-----
1167
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001168- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1169 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1170
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001171Windows
1172-------
1173
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001174- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1175 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1176 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1177 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1178 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1179 Python exception ::
1180
1181 thread.error: can't start new thread
1182
1183 is raised now.
1184
1185- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1186 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1187 instead of from DLL teardown.
1188
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001189Mac
1190---
1191
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001192- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001193 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001194 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1195 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1196 the executable in the bundle.
1197
1198- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001199
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001200- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1201
1202- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1203 on Panther.
1204
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001205What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1206================================
1207
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001208*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001209
1210Core and builtins
1211-----------------
1212
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001213- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1214 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1215 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1216 with the -i option.
1217
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001218- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1219 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1220
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001221- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1222 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1223
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001224- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1225 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1226 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1227 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1228 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1229 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1230 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1231 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1232 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1233 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1234 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1235 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1236 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001237
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001238- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1239 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1240 embedded in a lambda expression.
1241
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001242- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1243 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1244 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1245 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1246 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1247
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001248- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1249 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1250 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1251
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001252- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1253 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1254
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001255- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1256 It's writable again.
1257
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001258- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1259 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1260 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001261 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001262
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001263- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1264 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1265 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1266
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001267Extension modules
1268-----------------
1269
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001270- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1271 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1272
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001273- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1274 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1275 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1276 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1277
1278- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1279 collection.
1280
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001281- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1282 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1283 unique within a single program run.
1284
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001285- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1286 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1287
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001288- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1289 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1290
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001291- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1292 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001293
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001294- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1295
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001296- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1297 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1298
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001299- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1300 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1301 for many BSD-derived systems.
1302
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001303
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001304Library
1305-------
1306
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001307- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1308 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1309 primary ones:
1310
1311 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1312 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1313 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1314
1315 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1316 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1317 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1318 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1319 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1320 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1321
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001322- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1323 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1324 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1325 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1326 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1327 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1328 argument.
1329
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001330- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1331 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1332 in the archive.
1333
1334- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1335 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1336
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001337- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1338 569574).
1339
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001340- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1341 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1342 no more.
1343
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001344- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1345 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1346 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1347 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1348 code coverage.
1349
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001350- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1351 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1352 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001353 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1354 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001355
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001356- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1357 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1358 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001359 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001360
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001361- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1362
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001363- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1364 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1365 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1366 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1367
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001368- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1369 handling.
1370
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001371- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1372 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1373
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001374- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1375 in socket.py.
1376
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001377- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1378
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001379- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1380 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1381 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1382 opener with proxy support.
1383
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001384- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1385
1386- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1387
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001388Tools/Demos
1389-----------
1390
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001391- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1392
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001393- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1394
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001395- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1396 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001397
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001398- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1399 files.
1400
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001401Build
1402-----
1403
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001404- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001405 different root directory.
1406
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001407C API
1408-----
1409
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001410- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1411 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1412 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1413 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1414 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1415 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1416 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1417 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1418 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1419 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1420
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001421- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1422 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1423 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1424 from Python.
1425
1426
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001427New platforms
1428-------------
1429
1430None this time.
1431
1432Tests
1433-----
1434
1435- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1436 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1437
1438Windows
1439-------
1440
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001441- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1442
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001443- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1444 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1445 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1446 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1447 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1448 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1449 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1450 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1451 that's what it's for.
1452
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001453Mac
1454---
1455
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001456- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1457 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1458 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1459 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001460- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1461 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1462- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001463
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001464SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1465------------------------------------
1466
1467430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1468598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1469622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1470661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1471683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1472697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1473713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1474724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1475727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1476729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1477730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1478731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1479732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1480733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1481735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1482740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1483744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1484745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1485747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1486749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1487751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1488753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1489755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1490757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1491760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1492
1493
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001494What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1495================================
1496
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001497*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001498
1499Core and builtins
1500-----------------
1501
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001502- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1503 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1504
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001505- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1506 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1507 and cannot be strings).
1508
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001509- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1510 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1511 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1512 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1513
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001514- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1515 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1516 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1517 Python itself.
1518
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001519- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1520 the referenced object, if it has one.
1521
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001522- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1523 the thread started at
1524 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1525
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001526- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1527 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1528 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1529 placed on a list index.
1530
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001531- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1532 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1533 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1534 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1535
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001536- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1537 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1538 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1539 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1540 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1541 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1542 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1543
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001544- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1545 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1546 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1547 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1548 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1549
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001550- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1551 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001552
1553- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1554 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1555 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1556 #693195.)
1557
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001558- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1559 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001560
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001561- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001562 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001563 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1564 interpreter executions, would fail.
1565
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001566- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001567 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001568 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001569
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001570Extension modules
1571-----------------
1572
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001573- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1574 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1575 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1576 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1577
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001578- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1579 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1580
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001581- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1582 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1583 and Greg Chapman.)
1584
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001585- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1586 recursively.
1587
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001588- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001589 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1590 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1591 leaks.
1592
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001593- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1594
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001595- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1596 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1597 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1598 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1599 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1600 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1601 #705836.
1602
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001603- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001604 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1605
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001606- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1607 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1608 See SF bug #692416.
1609
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001610- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1611 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1612
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001613- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1614 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1615 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001616
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001617- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001618 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1619 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1620
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001621- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1622 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1623 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1624 timeouts to work properly.
1625
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001626Library
1627-------
1628
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001629- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1630 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1631 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1632 future release.
1633
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001634- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1635 for querying platform dependent features.
1636
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001637- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001638
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001639- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1640 pickle protocol versions.
1641
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001642- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1643 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1644 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1645
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001646- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1647
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001648- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1649 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1650 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1651 modules.
1652
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001653- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1654 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1655 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1656
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001657- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1658 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1659
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001660- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1661 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1662 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1663
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001664- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001665 MS Office extensions.
1666
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001667- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1668 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1669
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001670- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1671 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1672
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001673- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1674 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1675 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1676 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1677 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1678 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1679
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001680- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1681 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1682 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001683
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001684- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1685 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1686 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1687
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001688- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1689
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001690- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1691 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1692 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1693
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001694Tools/Demos
1695-----------
1696
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001697- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1698 See the module docstring for details.
1699
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001700Build
1701-----
1702
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001703- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1704 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001705
1706C API
1707-----
1708
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001709- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1710
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001711- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1712 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1713 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1714
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001715- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1716 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001717
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001718 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1719 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1720 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001721
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001722- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001723 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1724
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001725- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1726 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1727 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001728
1729New platforms
1730-------------
1731
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001732None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001733
1734Tests
1735-----
1736
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001737- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1738 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001739
1740Windows
1741-------
1742
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001743- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1744 function.
1745
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001746- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1747 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001748
1749Mac
1750---
1751
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001752- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1753 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001754
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001755- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1756 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001757
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001758- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1759 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1760 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001761
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001762- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001763 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1764 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001765
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001766- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1767 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001768
1769
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001770What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1771=================================
1772
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001773*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001774
1775Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001776-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001777
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001778- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1779 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1780 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1781
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001782- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1783 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1784 (SF patch #664376.)
1785
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001786- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1787 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1788 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1789 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1790 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1791 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001792 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001793
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001794- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1795 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1796 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1797 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001798 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001799
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001800- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1801 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1802 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1803 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1804 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1805 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1806 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1807 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1808 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1809 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1810 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1811
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001812- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1813 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1814 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1815 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1816 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1817 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1818
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001819- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1820 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1821
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001822- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1823 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1824 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1825 case.)
1826
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001827- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1828 passed as unicode strings.
1829
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001830- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1831 See SF bug #683467.
1832
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001833- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1834 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1835
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001836- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1837
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001838- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1839
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001840- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1841 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1842 arguments.
1843
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001844- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1845 See SF bug #667147.
1846
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001847- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001848 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001849 See SF bug #676155.
1850
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001851- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001852 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001853 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1854 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1855 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1856 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1857 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1858 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001859
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001860Extension modules
1861-----------------
1862
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001863- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1864 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1865 tp_as_number pointer.
1866
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001867- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1868 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1869 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1870 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1871 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1872
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001873- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1874
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001875- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1876
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001877- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001878 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001879 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1880 patch #678531.)
1881
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001882- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1883 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1884
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001885- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1886 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1887
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001888- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1889
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001890- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1891 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1892 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1893
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001894- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1895
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001896- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1897 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1898
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001899- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001900
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001901- datetime changes:
1902
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001903 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1904
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001905 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1906 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1907 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1908 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1909 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1910 now.
1911
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001912 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001913 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1914 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001915
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001916 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001917 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001918 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1919 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1920 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1921 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001922
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001923 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1924 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1925 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001926 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1927
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001928 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1929 by a later example coded by Guido.
1930
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001931 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001932 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1933 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1934 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001935 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1936 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1937
1938 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1939 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1940 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1941 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1942 tzinfo subclass instance.
1943
1944 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1945 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1946 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1947 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1948 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1949 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1950 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1951 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001952
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001953 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1954 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1955 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1956 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1957 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001958 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1959
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001960 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001961
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001962 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1963 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1964 as a naive datetime object.
1965
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001966 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1967 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1968 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1969
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001970 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1971 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1972 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1973 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1974 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1975 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1976 comparison.
1977
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001978 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1979 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1980 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1981 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001982 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001983
1984 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001985
1986 and ::
1987
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001988 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1989
1990 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1991 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1992 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1993 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1994
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001995 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1996 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1997 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1998 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1999 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2000
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002001 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2002 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002003 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2004 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002005
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002006Library
2007-------
2008
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002009- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2010 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2011
2012- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2013 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2014 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2015 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2016 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2017 See PEP 307 for details.
2018
2019- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2020 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2021
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002022- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2023 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002024 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002025 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2026 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002027 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002028
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002029- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2030 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2031
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002032- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2033 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2034 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2035
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002036- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2037
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002038- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2039 exception.
2040
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002041- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2042 class.
2043
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002044- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2045 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2046 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2047
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002048- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2049 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2050
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002051- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002052 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2053 See SF bug #659228.
2054
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002055- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2056 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2057 See SF patch #651082.
2058
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002059- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002060
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002061- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2062 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2063
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002064- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002065 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002066
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002067- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2068 DOS paths from other platforms.
2069
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002070Tools/Demos
2071-----------
2072
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002073- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2074 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2075 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2076 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2077 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2078 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2079 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2080 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2081 example:
2082
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002083 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2084 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002085
2086 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2087
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002088
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002089Build
2090-----
2091
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002092- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2093 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2094 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002095 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2096
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002097 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2098
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002099- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2100 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2101 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2102 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2103 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2104 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2105 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2106 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2107 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2108
2109- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2110 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2111 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2112 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2113
2114- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2115 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2116
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002117C API
2118-----
2119
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002120- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2121 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002122
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002123- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2124 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2125 tp_as_number pointer.
2126
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002127- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2128 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2129 (SF #681367)
2130
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002131- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2132 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2133 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2134 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002135
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002136Tests
2137-----
2138
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002139- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002140 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2141 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2142 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2143 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2144 pydoc.)
2145
2146- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2147
2148- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002149
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002150Windows
2151-------
2152
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002153- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2154 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2155 time).
2156
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002157- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2158 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2159
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002160- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2161 release without strong cryptography.
2162
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002163- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002164 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002165
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002166- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2167 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2168
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002169Mac
2170---
2171
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002172- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2173 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002174
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002175- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2176 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2177 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002178
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002179- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2180 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002181
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002182- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2183 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2184 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2185 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002186
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002187- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002188 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2189 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2190 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002191
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002192
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002193What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002194=================================
2195
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002196*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002197
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002198Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002199--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002200
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002201- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2202
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002203- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2204 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002205 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002206 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002207 a different meaning than before.
2208
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002209- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002210 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002211 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002212
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002213- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002214 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002215 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002216
2217- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2218 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2219 and deallocation.
2220
2221- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2222 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2223
2224- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2225 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2226 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2227 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2228 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2229
2230- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2231 now detected by the garbage collector.
2232
2233- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2234 [SF bug 519621]
2235
2236- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2237 identifier.
2238
2239- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2240 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2241 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2242 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2243 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2244 [SF bug 563060]
2245
2246- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2247 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2248 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2249 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2250 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2251
2252- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2253 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2254 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2255
2256- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2257
2258- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2259 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2260 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2261 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2262 state of the slots would be lost.)
2263
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002264Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002265-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002266
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002267- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002268 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2269 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2270 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2271 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002272 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2273 Jython 2.1.
2274
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002275- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002276 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002277 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2278 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2279 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2280 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2281 these, see PEP 302.
2282
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002283- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2284 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2285 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2286
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002287- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2288 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2289 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2290
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002291- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2292 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2293 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2294
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002295- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2296 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2297 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2298 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2299 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2300 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2301 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2302 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2303 releases or implementations.
2304
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002305- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002306 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2307 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002308
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002309- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2310 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2311
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002312- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2313 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2314 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2315
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002316- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2317 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2318
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002319- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2320 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002321 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2322 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002323
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002324- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2325 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2326 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2327 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2328 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2329
2330 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2331 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2332 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2333 pattern.
2334
2335 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2336 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2337 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2338 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2339
2340 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2341 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2342 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2343 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2344 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2345 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2346
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002347- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2348 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2349 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2350 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2351 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2352 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2353 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2354 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002355
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002356- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2357 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2358 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2359 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2360 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002361 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2362 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2363 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2364 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2365 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2366 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2367 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002368
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002369- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2370 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2371
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002372- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2373 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2374 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2375 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2376 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2377 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2378 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2379 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2380 to Zack Weinberg!
2381
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002382- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2383 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2384 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2385 type. This has been fixed now.
2386
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002387- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2388 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2389 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2390
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002391- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2392 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2393 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2394 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2395 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2396 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2397 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2398 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002399 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002400
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002401- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2402 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2403 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002404
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002405- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2406 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2407 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2408 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2409 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2410 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2411 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2412 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002413 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002414 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2415 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2416
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002417- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2418 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2419 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2420 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2421 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2422 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2423 this.)
2424
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002425- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2426 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002427 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002428 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002429 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2430 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002431 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2432 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002433
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002434- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2435 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2436 currently running.
2437
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002438- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2439 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2440 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2441 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2442
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002443- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2444 as directory names.
2445
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002446- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2447 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2448
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002449- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2450 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2451
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002452- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002453 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2454 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002455
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002456- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2457 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2458 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2459 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2460 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2461
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002462- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2463 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2464 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2465 removed.
2466
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002467- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2468 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2469 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2470
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002471- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2472 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2473 to __debug__.
2474
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002475- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2476 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2477 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2478
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002479- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2480 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2481 deprecated now.
2482
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002483- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2484 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2485 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002486
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002487- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2488 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2489 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2490 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2491 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002492
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002493- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2494 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2495
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002496- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2497 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2498 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002499 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002500 is backward compatible.
2501
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002502- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2503 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2504 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2505 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2506 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2507
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002508- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2509 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2510 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2511 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2512 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2513 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002514
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002515- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2516 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2517
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002518- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2519 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2520
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002521- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2522 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2523 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2524 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2525 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2526
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002527- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2528 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2529 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2530
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002531- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002532 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2533
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002534- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2535 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2536 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002537
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002538- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2539 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2540
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002541- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2542 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2543 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2544
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002545- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2546
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002547Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002548-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002549
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002550- Added three operators to the operator module:
2551 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2552 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2553 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2554
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002555- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2556
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002557- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2558 archives.
2559
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002560- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2561 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2562 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2563
2564 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2565
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002566- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2567 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2568 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002569 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002570
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002571- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2572 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2573 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2574 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002575 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2576 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2577 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2578 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002579
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002580- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2581 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002582
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002583- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2584
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002585- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2586 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2587
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002588- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2589 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2590 supported.
2591
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002592- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2593
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002594- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2595 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002596
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002597- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2598 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2599
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002600- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2601
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002602- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2603 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2604
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002605- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2606 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2607 functions but callable type objects.
2608
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002609- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002610 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002611 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002612
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002613- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2614 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002615
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002616- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2617 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002618
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002619- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2620 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2621 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2622 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2623
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002624- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2625 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002626
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002627- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2628 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2629 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2630 and __imul__.
2631
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002632- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002633 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2634 is called.
2635
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002636- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2637 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2638 interpreter was compiled.
2639
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002640- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2641 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2642 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002643 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002644 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2645 1, not 2.
2646
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002647- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2648 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2649 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2650 limit.
2651
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002652- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2653 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2654 bug #623464.
2655
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002656- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2657 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2658 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2659 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2660
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002661Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002662-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002663
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002664- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2665
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002666- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2667 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2668 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2669 with Python 2.3a2.
2670
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002671- os.path exposes getctime.
2672
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002673- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002674 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002675 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002676 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002677 unit tests of floating point results.
2678
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002679- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2680 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2681 has been increased.
2682
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002683- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2684 executed.
2685
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002686- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2687 postinstallation script.
2688
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002689- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2690 test the current module.
2691
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002692- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002693 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2694 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2695 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2696 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2697
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002698- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002699 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002700 Ward's Optik package.
2701
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002702- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2703 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2704 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2705 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2706
2707- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2708 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002709 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002710
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002711- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2712 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2713 shelf are binary pickles.
2714
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002715- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2716 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2717
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002718- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2719 modules are iterators now.
2720
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002721- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2722 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2723 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2724 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2725 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2726 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002727
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002728- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2729 with their entity value.
2730
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002731- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2732
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002733- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2734 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002735
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002736- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2737 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002738 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002739
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002740- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2741 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2742 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2743 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2744 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2745 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2746 main():
2747
2748 import locale
2749 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2750
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002751- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2752 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2753
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002754- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2755 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2756 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2757 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2758 to the new standard.
2759
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002760- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2761 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2762 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2763 an extension to the database.
2764
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002765- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2766 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2767 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2768 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002769 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002770
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002771- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002772 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002773
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002774- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2775 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2776 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2777 bounded integers.
2778
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002779- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2780 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2781 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2782 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2783 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2784 in existence.
2785
2786 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2787 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2788 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2789 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2790 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2791 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2792
2793 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2794 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2795 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2796 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2797
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002798- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2799 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2800 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2801
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002802- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2803
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002804- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2805 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2806 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2807 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2808
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002809- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2810 argument.
2811
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002812- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2813 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2814 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2815 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2816 [SF patch 560794].
2817
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002818- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2819 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2820 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002821 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2822 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2823 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002824
2825- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2826 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002827
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002828- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2829 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2830 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2831 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002832
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002833- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2834 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2835 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2836 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2837 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2838
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002839- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002840
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002841- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2842
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002843- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2844 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2845 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2846 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2847 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2848 identical to None.
2849
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002850- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2851 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2852 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2853 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2854 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2855 results now.
2856
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002857- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2858 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2859
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002860- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2861 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2862 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2863 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2864 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2865 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2866 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2867 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2868
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002869- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2870
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002871- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2872 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2873
2874- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2875 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2876 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2877 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2878 and other systems.
2879
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002880- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2881 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2882 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2883 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 +00002884 work well with these.
2885
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002886- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2887
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002888- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002889 connections.
2890
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002891- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2892 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2893 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2894
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002895- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2896 sets
2897
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002898- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2899 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2900 name.
2901
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002902- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2903 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2904 passed in.
2905
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002906- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002907 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002908 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2909 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002910
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002911- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2912
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002913- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2914
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002915- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2916 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2917 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2918
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002919- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2920 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2921 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2922 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002923 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002924
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002925- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002926 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002927 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002928
2929- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2930 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2931 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2932
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002933- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002934 the value of its expression argument.
2935
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002936- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2937 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2938 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2939
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002940- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2941 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2942 skipstone browser was included.
2943
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002944- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2945 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2946
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002947Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002948-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002949
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002950- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2951 names in addition to accepting file names.
2952
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002953- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2954 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2955 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2956 still used and useful.)
2957
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002958- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2959 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2960 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2961 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002962
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002963- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2964 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2965 the generated binary.
2966
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002967Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002968-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002969
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002970- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2971
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002972- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2973 except in the hands of experts.
2974
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002975- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002976 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2977 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2978 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002979
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002980- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2981 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2982 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2983 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2984 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2985 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2986 builds.
2987
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002988- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2989 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2990 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2991 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2992 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2993 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2994 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2995 new type.
2996
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002997- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002998
2999 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3000 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3001 positive infinities.
3002
3003 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3004 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3005 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3006 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3007 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3008 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3009 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3010
3011 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3012
3013 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3014
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003015- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3016 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3017 size of the executable.
3018
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003019- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3020 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3021 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3022 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003023
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003024- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3025
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003026- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3027 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3028 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003029
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003030- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3031 well as Unix.
3032
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003033- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3034 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3035 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3036 modules in the README file for details.
3037
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003038C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003039-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003040
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003041- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3042 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003043 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003044 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003045 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003046
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003047- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3048 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3049 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3050 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3051 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3052 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003053 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003054 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3055 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3056 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3057 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3058 aligned.)
3059
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003060- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3061 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3062 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3063
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003064- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3065 level.
3066
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003067- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3068 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3069 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3070 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3071 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3072
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003073- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3074 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3075 code.
3076
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003077- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3078 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3079 adjusting for negative indices.
3080
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003081- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3082 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3083 object.
3084
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003085- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3086 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3087 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3088
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003089- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3090 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003091
3092- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3093
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003094- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3095 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3096 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3097 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3098
3099- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3100
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003101- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003102
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003103- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003104 without going through the buffer API.
3105
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003106- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003107
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003108- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3109 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3110 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3111 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3112
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003113- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3114 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3115
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003116- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003117 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3118
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003119New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003120-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003121
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003122- OpenVMS is now supported.
3123
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003124- AtheOS is now supported.
3125
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003126- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3127
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003128- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3129
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003130Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003131-----
3132
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003133- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3134 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3135 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003136
3137Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003138-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003139
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003140- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3141 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3142 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3143 bugs.
3144 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003145 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003146 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3147 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003148 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003149
3150- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003151 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003152
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003153- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3154 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3155
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003156- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3157 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003158 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003159 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3160
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003161- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3162 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3163 use files" uninstall option).
3164
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003165- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3166
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003167- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3168 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3169
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003170- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3171 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3172 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3173
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003174- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3175 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3176 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3177 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3178 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003179 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3180 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3181 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003182
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003183- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003184 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003185 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3186 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3187 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3188 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3189 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3190 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3191 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3192 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3193 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3194 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3195 work around.
3196
3197- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3198 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3199 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3200 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3201 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3202 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3203 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3204 specified with O_CREAT too).
3205
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003206Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003207----
3208
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003209- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003210
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003211- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3212 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3213 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3214
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003215- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3216 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3217 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3218
3219- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3220 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3221 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3222 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3223 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3224 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3225 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3226 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003227
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003228- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3229 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3230 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003231
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003232- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3233 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3234 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3235 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3236 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003237
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003238- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3239 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3240 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003241
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003242- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3243 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003244
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003245- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3246 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3247 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3248 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3249 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003250
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003251- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3252 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3253 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3254
3255- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3256 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3257 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003258
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003259- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3260 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3261 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3262 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003263 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003264
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003265- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3266 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003267
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003268- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3269 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003270
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003271- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003272 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003273 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3274 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003275
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003276
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003277What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003278===============================
3279
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003280*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3281
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003282Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003283--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003284
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003285- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3286 with a custom metaclass.
3287
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003288Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003289-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003290
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003291- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3292 are proxies.
3293
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003294Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003295-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003296
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003297- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3298 very short strings.
3299
3300- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3301 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3302 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3303 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3304 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3305
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003306Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003307-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003308
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003309- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3310 close or delete time).
3311
3312- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3313 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3314
3315- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3316
3317- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003318 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003319
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003320Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003321-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003322
3323Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003324-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003325
3326C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003327-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003328
3329New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003330-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003331
3332Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003333-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003334
3335Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003336-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003337
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003338- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3339
3340- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3341 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3342
3343- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3344 deleted at process exit time.
3345
3346- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3347 in backslash.
3348
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003349Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003350----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003351
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003352- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3353 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3354 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3355
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003356
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003357What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003358===========================
3359
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003360*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3361
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003362Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003363--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003364
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003365- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3366 been extensively updated. See
3367
3368 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3369
3370 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3371
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003372- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3373 deleted!
3374
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003375- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3376 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3377 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3378 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3379 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3380
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003381- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3382
3383 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3384 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3385
3386 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3387 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3388 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3389 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3390 supported anyway.
3391
3392 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3393 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3394
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003395- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3396 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3397 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3398 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3399 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003400
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003401- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3402 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3403 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3404
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003405Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003406-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003407
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003408- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3409 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3410 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3411 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3412 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3413 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003414 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3415 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3416 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3417 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003418
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003419- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3420 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3421 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3422
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003423Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003424-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003425
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003426- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3427
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003428Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003429-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003430
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003431- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3432 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3433 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3434 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3435 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3436 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3437
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003438- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3439
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003440- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3441
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003442- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3443
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003444- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3445 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3446 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3447
3448- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3449
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003450Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003451-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003452
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003453- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3454 off a search on Google.
3455
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003456Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003457-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003458
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003459- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3460 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3461 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3462 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3463 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3464 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3465 other platforms should do likewise.
3466
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003467- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3468 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3469 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3470
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003471C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003472-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003473
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003474- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3475 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3476 producing key-value pairs.
3477
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003478- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003479 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003480 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3481 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3482 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3483 previously went unchallenged.
3484
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003485New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003486-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003487
3488Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003489-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003490
3491Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003492-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003493
3494Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003495----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003496
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003497- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3498 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003499
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003500- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3501 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3502 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3503 home.
3504
3505
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003506What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003507===========================
3508
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003509*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3510
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003511Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003512--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003513
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003514- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3515 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003516
3517 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003518 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003519
3520 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3521 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003522 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003523 This needs to be documented.
3524
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003525- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3526 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3527
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003528- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3529 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3530 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3531
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003532- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3533 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3534
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003535- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3536 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3537 class forbids it).
3538
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003539- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3540 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3541 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3542
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003543- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3544
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003545Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003546-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003547
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003548- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3549 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003550 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003551
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003552- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3553 (like 1 + '').
3554
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003555Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003556-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003557
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003558- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3559 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3560 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3561 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003562 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003563 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3564
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003565- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3566 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3567 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3568 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3569
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003570- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3571 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003572 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3573 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3574 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003575
3576- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3577 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003578
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003579- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3580 bytes on its input.
3581
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003582Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003583-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003584
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003585- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003586 convenience function.
3587
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003588- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3589 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3590 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003591 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3592 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3593 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3594 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3595 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3596 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003597
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003598- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3599 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3600 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3601 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3602
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003603- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3604 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3605 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3606
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003607- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3608 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3609 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3610 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3611
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003612- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3613 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003614 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003615 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3616 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3617 new -l and -e options.
3618
3619- statcache is now deprecated.
3620
3621- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3622 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003623 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003624 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3625 time properly taken into account.
3626
3627- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3628 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3629 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3630 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3631
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003632Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003633-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003634
3635Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003636-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003637
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003638- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3639 is built with libdb3 if available.
3640
3641- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3642
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003643C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003644-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003645
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003646- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3647 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3648 PySequence_Size().
3649
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003650- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3651
3652- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3653 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3654 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3655
3656- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3657 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3658
3659- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3660 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3661
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003662New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003663-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003664
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003665- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3666 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3667
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003668- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3669 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3670
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003671- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3672
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003673Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003674-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003675
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003676- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3677 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3678
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003679Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003680-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003681
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003682Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003683----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003684
3685- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3686 removed completely in the next release.
3687
3688- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3689 OSX.
3690
3691- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3692 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3693
3694- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3695
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003696
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003697What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003698===========================
3699
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003700*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3701
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003702Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003703--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003704
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003705- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003706 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003707 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003708 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3709 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003710 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3711 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003712 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3713 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003714
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003715- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3716 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3717
3718- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3719 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3720
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003721Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003722-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003723
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003724- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3725 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3726 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3727 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3728 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3729 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3730 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3731 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3732
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003733- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3734 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3735 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3736 example).
3737
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003738- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003739 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003740 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003741 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003742
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003743- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3744 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3745 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003746 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003747
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003748- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3749 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3750 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3751 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3752 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3753 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3754
3755 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3756
3757 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3758
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003759Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003760-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003761
3762- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3763
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003764- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3765
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003766- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3767 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003768
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003769- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3770 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3771 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3772 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3773 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3774 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003775 attributes.
3776
3777- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3778 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3779 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003780
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003781- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3782 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3783 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003784
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003785- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3786 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3787 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003788 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3789 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3790
3791- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3792 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003793
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003794Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003795-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003796
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003797- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3798 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3799
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003800- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3801 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3802 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3803 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3804
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003805- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3806 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3807 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3808 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3809
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003810 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3811 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3812 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3813 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3814 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3815 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3816 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3817 without losing information).
3818
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003819- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003820 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3821 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3822 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3823 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3824 module).
3825
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003826 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003827 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3828 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3829 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3830 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003831
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003832- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003833 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3834 encoding.
3835
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003836- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3837 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3838
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003839- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003840 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3841
3842- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3843 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3844 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3845 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3846
3847- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3848
3849- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3850 ON, and OFF.
3851
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003852- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3853 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3854
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003855Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003856-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003857
3858- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3859 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3860 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003861
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003862- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3863 been added: -X and -E.
3864
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003865Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003866-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003867
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003868- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3869 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3870
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003871C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003872-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003873
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003874- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3875 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3876 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3877 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3878 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3879
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003880- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3881 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3882 as long) arguments.
3883
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003884- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3885 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3886 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3887 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3888 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3889 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3890
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003891- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3892 input.
3893
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003894New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003895-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003896
3897Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003898-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003899
3900Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003901-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003902
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003903- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3904 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3905 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3906
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003907- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3908 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3909 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003910 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003911
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003912 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3913 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3914 import signal
3915 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003916
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003917 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003918 while 1:
3919 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003920 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003921 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3922 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3923 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3924 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003925
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003926
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003927What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3928===========================
3929
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003930*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3931
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003932Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003933--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003934
3935- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3936 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3937 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3938
3939- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3940 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3941 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3942 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3943 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3944 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3945 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003946
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003947- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003948 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003949 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3950 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3951 associate a docstring with a property.
3952
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003953- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3954 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3955 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3956 other built-in object types.
3957
3958- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3959 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3960 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3961 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3962 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3963
3964- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3965 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3966
3967- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3968 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003969 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003970 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3971 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3972 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3973 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3974 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3975
3976- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3977 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3978 class.
3979
3980- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3981 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3982 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3983 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3984
3985- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3986 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3987 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3988 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3989
3990- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3991 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3992
3993- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3994 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3995 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3996 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3997 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003998 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003999 with the same value as s.
4000
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004001- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4002
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004003Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004004----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004005
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004006- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4007
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004008- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4009 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4010 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4011 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4012 objects.
4013
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004014- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4015 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004016 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4017 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4018
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004019- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4020 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4021 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4022
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004023Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004024-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004025
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004026- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4027 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4028 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4029 by the instances.
4030
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004031- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4032 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4033 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4034
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004035- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4036 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4037 before the entire comparison is complete.
4038
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004039- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4040 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4041 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4042
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004043- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4044 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4045 getwriter().
4046
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004047- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4048 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4049
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004050- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004051 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4052 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4053
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004054- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4055 iterable object.
4056
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004057- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4058 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004059
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004060- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4061 authentication.
4062
4063- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4064 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004065
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004066- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004067 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4068 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4069 a sample driver.)
4070
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004071Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004072-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004073
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004074- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4075 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4076 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4077 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4078 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4079 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4080 kernel has large file support.
4081
4082- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4083 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4084 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4085 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4086 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4087
4088- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4089 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4090 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4091
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004092C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004093-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004094
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004095- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4096 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4097
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004098New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004099-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004100
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004101- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4102 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4103
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004104Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004105-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004106
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004107- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4108 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4109 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4110 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4111 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4112
4113- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4114 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4115 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4116 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4117
4118- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4119 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4120
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004121Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004122-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004123
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004124- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004125 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4126 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004127
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004128
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004129What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4130===========================
4131
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004132*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4133
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004134Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004135----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004136
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004137- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4138 big to represent as a C double.
4139
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004140- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4141 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4142 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4143 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4144 restriction).
4145
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004146- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4147 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4148 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4149 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4150 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4151
4152 >>> dir([])
4153 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4154 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4155 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4156 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4157 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4158 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4159 'reverse', 'sort']
4160
4161 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4162
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004163- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004164 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4165 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4166 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4167 OverflowError exception.
4168
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004169- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004170 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004171 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4172 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4173 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4174 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4175 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004176 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004177 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4178 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4179
4180 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4181 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4182 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4183 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004184
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004185- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004186 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4187 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4188 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4189 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4190 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4191 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4192 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4193 once it is created.
4194
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004195- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4196 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4197 (key, value) pairs.
4198
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004199- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004200 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4201 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4202
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004203- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4204 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4205 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4206 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4207 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004208
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004209- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004210 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4211 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4212
4213 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4214
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004215- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004216 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4217
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004218Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004219-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004220
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004221- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004222 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4223 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004224
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004225- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4226 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4227 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4228 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4229 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4230 in this area anymore).
4231
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004232- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4233 threading.Timer.
4234
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004235- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4236 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4237
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004238- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004239 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4240
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004241- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004242 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4243 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4244 converted to Python longs.
4245
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004246- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004247 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4248
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004249- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4250 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4251 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4252
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004253Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004254-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004255
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004256- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4257 division operators as per PEP 238.
4258
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004259Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004260-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004261
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004262- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4263 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4264 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4265 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4266
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004267C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004268-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004269
4270- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004271
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004272- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4273 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004274 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004275
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004276 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4277 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004278 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004279 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004280
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004281- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004282 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4283 module:
4284
4285 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004286
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004287 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4288 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004289
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004290 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4291 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004292
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004293 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4294
4295 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4296
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004297- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004298 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4299 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4300 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004301
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004302New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004303-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004304
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004305- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4306 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4307 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4308 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4309 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004310
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004311Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004312-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004313
4314Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004315-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004316
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004317- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4318 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4319 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4320 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004321 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4322 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4323 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4324 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4325 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004326
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004327- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004328 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4329
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004330
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004331What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4332===========================
4333
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004334*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4335
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004336Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004337-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004338
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004339- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4340 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4341
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004342- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4343 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4344 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004345
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004346- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4347 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4348 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4349 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004350
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004351- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4352
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004353- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004354
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004355Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004356-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004357
4358- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004359 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004360 the module docstring for details.
4361
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004362Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004363-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004364
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004365- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004366 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4367 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4368 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004369
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004370- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4371 Nick Mathewson.
4372
4373Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004374----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004375
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004376- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4377 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4378 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4379 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4380 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4381 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4382 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4383 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4384
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004385- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4386 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4387 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4388 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4389
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004390- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4391 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4392 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4393 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4394 come a long way).
4395
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004396- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4397 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4398 write filters for these warnings).
4399
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004400- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4401 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4402 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4403 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4404 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4405
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004406- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4407 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4408 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4409 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4410 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4411 older distribution.
4412
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004413Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004414-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004415
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004416- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4417 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004418 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004419
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004420- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4421 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4422 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4423
4424- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4425
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004426- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4427
4428- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4429
4430- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4431
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004432- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004433
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004434- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4435
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004436New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004437-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004438
4439C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004440-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004441
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004442- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4443 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4444 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4445 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4446 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4447 against buffer overruns.
4448
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004449- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004450 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4451 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004452 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4453 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4454 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4455
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004456- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4457 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4458 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4459 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4460 deprecated.
4461
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004462Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004463-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004464
4465- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4466 relevant is found.
4467
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004468
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004469What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004470===========================
4471
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004472*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4473
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004474Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004475----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004476
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004477- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4478 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4479 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4480 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4481 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4482 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4483 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4484 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004485 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004486 repaired.
4487
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004488- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004489 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004490 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4491 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4492 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4493 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4494 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4495 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4496 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4497 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4498
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004499- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4500 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4501 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4502 leading BMO character).
4503
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004504- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4505 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4506 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4507
4508 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4509 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4510 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004511
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004512 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4513 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4514 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4515 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4516 for various simple to use conversions.
4517
4518 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4519 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4520
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004521 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4522 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4523 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4524 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4525 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4526 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4527 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4528 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4529 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4530 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4531 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4532 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4533 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4534 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4535 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004536
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004537- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4538 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4539 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004540 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004541 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004542
4543 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004544 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4545 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4546 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4547 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4548 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004549 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4550 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004551
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004552 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4553 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4554 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004555 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004556
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004557- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4558 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4559 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4560 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4561 floating arithmetic,
4562
4563 x = 9007199254740992.0
4564 print long(x)
4565
4566 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4567 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4568 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4569 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4570 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4571 functions are of good quality).
4572
4573 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4574 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4575 algorithms to break.
4576
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004577- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4578 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4579 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4580 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4581 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4582 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4583 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4584 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4585 order.
4586
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004587- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4588 operation along the most common code paths.
4589
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004590- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4591 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4592
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004593- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4594 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4595 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4596 {}.update(UserDict())
4597
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004598- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4599 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4600 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4601 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4602 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4603 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4604 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4605 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4606
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004607- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004608 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004609
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004610 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004611 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4612 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004613 join() method of strings
4614 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004615 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4616 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004617 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004618 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004619
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004620- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4621 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4622
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004623- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4624 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4625
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004626- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4627 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4628 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4629 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4630
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004631- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4632 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004633 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004634 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4635 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004636
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004637- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4638
4639
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004640Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004641-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004642
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004643- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004644 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004645 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4646 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4647
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004648- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4649 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4650
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004651- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4652 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4653 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4654 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4655
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004656- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4657 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4658 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4659
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004660- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4661
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004662- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4663
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004664- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4665 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4666 that are still imported into string.py).
4667
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004668- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4669
4670- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4671 Now it does.
4672
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004673- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4674
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004675- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4676 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4677 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4678 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4679 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004680 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4681 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004682
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004683- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4684 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4685 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4686 'help(object)'.
4687
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004688Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004689-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004690
4691- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004692 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004693 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4694 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4695
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004696- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004697 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4698 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004699
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004700C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004701-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004702
4703- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4704 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004705
4706----
4707
4708**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**