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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
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XXXX-XX-XX*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +000015- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
16 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
17 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
18 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
19
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +000020- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
21 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
22
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +000023- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
24 constant.
25
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +000026- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
27 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
28 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
29 large), and to anomalies such as
30 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
31 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
32 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
33 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000034
35Extension modules
36-----------------
37
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +000038- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
39 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +000040 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
41 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
42 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000043
44Library
45-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +000046
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +000047- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
48 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
49 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
50 Closes bug #1039270.
51
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +000052- Updates for the email package:
53 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
54 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
55 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
56 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
57 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
58 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
59 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
60 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
61 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
62 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
63 + Updates to documentation.
64
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +000065- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
66 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
67 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
68 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
69
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +000070- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000071
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +000072- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
73 applications should use the getmember function.
74
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +000075- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
76
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +000077- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
78 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
79 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
80 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
81 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
82 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
83 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
84 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
85 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
86
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000087- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
88 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +000089 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000090
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +000091- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
92 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
93 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
94 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
95 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
96 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
97 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
98 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000099
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000100- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
101 the new public features (of which there are many).
102
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000103- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000104 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
105 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
106 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
107 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000108 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000109
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000110- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
111
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000112- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
113 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
114 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
115 options.
116
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000117- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
118 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
119 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
120 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
121 conditions under which non-string values work.
122
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000123Build
124-----
125
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000126- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
127 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
128 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
129
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000130- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
131 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
132 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
133 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
134 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000135
136C API
137-----
138
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000139- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
140
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000141- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
142 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
143 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000144
145Documentation
146-------------
147
148...
149
150Tests
151-----
152
153- test__locale ported to unittest
154
155Windows
156-------
157
158...
159
160Mac
161---
162
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000163- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
164 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
165 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000166
167New platforms
168-------------
169
170...
171
172Tools/Demos
173-----------
174
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000175- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
176 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
177 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
178 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
179 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000180
181
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000182What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
183=================================
184
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000185*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000186
187Core and builtins
188-----------------
189
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000190- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000191 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
192
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000193- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
194 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
195 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
196 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
197 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
198 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
199 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
200 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000201 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
202 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
203 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
204 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
205 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000206
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000207- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
208 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
209 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
210 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
211 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
212
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000213- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
214
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000215- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
216 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
217
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000218- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
219 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
220 modified the list.
221
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000222- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
223 functions is now writable.
224
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000225- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
226 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
227 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
228 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
229
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000230- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
231 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
232 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
233 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
234 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000235
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000236- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
237 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
238
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000239Extension modules
240-----------------
241
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000242- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
243
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000244- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
245 data.
246
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000247- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
248 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
249 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
250 supposed to have been truncated away.
251
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000252- Added socket.socketpair().
253
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000254- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
255 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
256
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000257- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000258 versions of Python, have now been removed.
259
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000260Library
261-------
262
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000263- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000264 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000265
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000266- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
267 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
268
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000269- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
270 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
271
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000272- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
273
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000274- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
275 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000276
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000277- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
278 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
279
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000280- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
281
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000282- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
283
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000284- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
285
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000286- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
287 Percivall.
288
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000289- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
290 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
291
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000292- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
293 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
294 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000295 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000296
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000297- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
298 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
299 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
300 and exponent.
301
302- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
303
304- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
305 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
306 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
307
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000308- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
309 to the readline module.
310
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000311- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000312 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
313 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000314
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000315- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
316 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
317 contains symlinks.
318
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000319- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
320 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
321
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000322- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
323 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
324 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
325
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000326- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
327 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
328 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
329 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
330 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
331 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
332 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
333 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
334 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
335 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
336 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
337 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
338 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
339
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000340- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
341
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000342Tools/Demos
343-----------
344
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000345- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
346 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
347
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000348- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
349
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000350Build
351-----
352
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000353- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
354 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
355 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
356 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
357 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
358 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
359 plans to do so.
360
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000361- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
362 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
363
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000364- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
365 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
366
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000367- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
368 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
369
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000370- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
371 GNU/k*BSD systems.
372
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000373- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
374 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
375
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000376C API
377-----
378
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000379..
380
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000381Documentation
382-------------
383
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000384- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
385 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
386
387- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
388 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
389 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000390
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000391New platforms
392-------------
393
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000394- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
395
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000396Tests
397-----
398
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000399..
400
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000401Windows
402-------
403
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000404- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
405 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
406 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
407 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
408 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
409 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
410 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
411 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
412 the problem.
413
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000414Mac
415---
416
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000417..
418
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000419
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000420What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
421=================================
422
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000423*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000424
425Core and builtins
426-----------------
427
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000428- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
429 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
430 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
431 sensitive code.
432
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000433- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000434 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000435
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000436 @staticmethod
437 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000438
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000439 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000440
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000441- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
442 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
443 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
444 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
445 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
446 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
447 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
448 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
449 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
450 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
451 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
452
453 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
454 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
455 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
456 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
457 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
458 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
459 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
460
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000461- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
462 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
463
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000464- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000465 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000466
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000467- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000468 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000469 which was missing for no apparent reason.
470
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000471- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000472 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
473 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
474
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000475- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
476 types that support garbage collection.
477
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000478- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
479
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000480- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
481 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
482 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
483 Jython.
484
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000485- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
486
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000487- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
488 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
489
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000490- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
491 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
492 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000493
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000494- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
495 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
496 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
497
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000498Extension modules
499-----------------
500
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000501- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
502
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000503Library
504-------
505
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000506- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
507 TIS-620
508
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000509- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
510 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
511 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
512 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
513 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
514 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
515 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
516 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
517 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
518 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
519
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000520- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
521
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000522- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
523 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
524 same as when the argument is omitted).
525 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
526
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000527- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
528
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000529- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
530 schemes are offered.
531
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000532- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
533
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000534- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
535 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
536 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
537
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000538- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
539
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000540- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
541 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
542
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000543- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
544 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
545 when dummy_threading is being used.
546
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000547- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
548 from a tarfile.
549
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000550- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000551 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000552
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000553- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
554 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
555 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
556 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
557
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000558- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
559 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
560
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000561- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
562 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
563 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
564 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
565 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
566 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
567 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
568 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
569 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
570 by some other method in progress).
571
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000572- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
573 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
574 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000575
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000576- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
577
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000578- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
579 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
580 AM Kuchling.
581
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000582- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
583 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
584 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
585
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000586- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
587 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
588 instead of unsigned.
589
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000590- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000591 no longer part of the public API.
592
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000593- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
594 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
595 string methods of the same name).
596
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000597- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000598 SF patch 945642.
599
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000600- doctest unittest integration improvements:
601
602 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
603
604 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
605 DocTestSuites.
606
607- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
608 that provide thread-local data.
609
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000610- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
611 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
612
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000613- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
614
615- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
616 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
617 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
618
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000619- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
620
621 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
622 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
623 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000624
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000625 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
626 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
627 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
628 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
629
630 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
631 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
632
633 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
634 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
635 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
636 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
637
638 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
639 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
640 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
641 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
642 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
643
644 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
645 wrapping help output.
646
647 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
648 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
649 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000650
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000651C API
652-----
653
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000654- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
655 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
656 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
657 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
658 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
659 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
660 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
661 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
662 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
663 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
664 its visible semantics have not changed.
665
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000666- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
667 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
668
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000669Documentation
670-------------
671
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000672- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000673
674 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000675 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000676
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000677 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000678
679 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
680
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000681- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000682
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000683Tests
684-----
685
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000686- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000687 platforms that use the Makefile.
688
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000689- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
690 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
691 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
692
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000693
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000694What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
695=================================
696
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000697*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000698
699Core and builtins
700-----------------
701
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000702- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
703 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
704 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
705 objects now (one object instead of three).
706
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000707- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
708 Windows DLLs.
709
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000710- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
711 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000712
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000713- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
714 a new .pyc magic.
715
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000716- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
717 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
718 be there.
719
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000720- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
721 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
722 the LC_NUMERIC category.
723
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000724- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
725 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
726 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
727
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000728- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
729
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000730- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
731 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
732 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000733
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000734- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
735 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
736
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000737- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
738
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000739- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000740 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000741
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000742- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
743
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000744- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
745
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000746- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
747 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
748
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000749- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
750 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
751 Fixes bug #858016 .
752
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000753- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
754 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
755 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
756
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000757- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
758 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
759 improves their performance (about 35%).
760
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000761- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
762 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
763 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
764
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000765- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
766 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
767 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
768 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
769
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000770- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
771 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
772 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
773 length is not known).
774
775- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
776 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000777 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
778 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000779 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
780
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000781- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
782 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
783
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000784- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
785 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
786 keyword arguments.
787
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000788- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
789 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
790 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
791
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000792- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
793 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
794 cases.
795
796- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
797 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
798 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
799 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
800 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
801 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
802 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
803 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
804 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
805 a release build.
806
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000807- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
808 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
809
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000810- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000811 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000812
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000813- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
814 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
815 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
816 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
817 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
818 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
819 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
820 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
821 destroyed.
822
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000823- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
824 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
825 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
826 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
827 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
828 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
829 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
830 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
831
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000832- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
833 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
834 character other than a space.
835
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000836- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
837 by the function object or by the method object, the function
838 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
839 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
840 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
841 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
842 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
843 attributes with the same name.
844
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000845- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
846 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
847 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
848 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
849 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
850 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
851 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
852 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
853 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
854 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
855 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
856 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
857 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
858 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000859
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000860- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
861 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
862 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
863 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
864 This has been repaired.
865
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000866- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
867
868- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
869
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000870- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
871 over a sequence.
872
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000873- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000874 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000875
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000876- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
877
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000878- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
879 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
880 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
881 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
882 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
883 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
884 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
885 records with equal keys is unchanged).
886
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000887- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
888 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
889 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
890
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000891- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
892 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
893 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
894 freelist.
895
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000896- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
897 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
898
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000899- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
900 number.
901
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000902- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
903 a TypeError exception.
904
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000905- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
906 820195.
907
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000908- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
909 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
910 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
911
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000912- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000913 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
914 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000915
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000916- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
917 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
918 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
919
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000920- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
921 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000922 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000923
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000924- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000925 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
926 the first call.
927
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000928
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000929Extension modules
930-----------------
931
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000932- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
933 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
934
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000935- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
936 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
937 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
938 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
939 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
940 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
941 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000942
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000943- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
944
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000945- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
946
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000947- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
948 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
949
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000950- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
951 fewer false positives.
952
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000953- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
954 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
955
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000956- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000957 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
958
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000959- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000960 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000961 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +0000962 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
963 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000964
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000965- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
966 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
967 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
968 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
969
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000970- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
971 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
972 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
973 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
974 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
975 #897625.
976
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000977- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
978 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
979
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000980- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
981 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
982 and pops on either side of the deque.
983
984- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
985 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
986
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000987- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
988 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
989 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
990 other functions that expect a function argument.
991
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000992- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
993
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000994- os.getsid was added.
995
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000996- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
997 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
998 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
999
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001000- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1001
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001002- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1003
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001004- readline.clear_history was added.
1005
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001006- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1007
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001008- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1009
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001010- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1011
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001012- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1013
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001014- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1015
1016- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1017
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001018- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1019
1020- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1021
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001022- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1023 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1024 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1025
1026- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1027 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1028 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1029 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1030 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1031 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1032 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1033
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001034- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1035 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1036 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1037 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001038
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001039- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001040 iterators from a single iterable.
1041
1042- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1043 of raising a TypeError exception.
1044
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001045- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1046 as parameter.
1047
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001048Library
1049-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001050
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001051- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1052 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1053 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001054
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001055- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1056 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1057 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001058
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001059- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001060
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001061- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1062 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001063
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001064- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1065 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1066
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001067- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1068
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001069- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001070 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001071
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001072- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001073 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001074
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001075- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1076
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001077- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1078 on cygwin and mingw32.
1079
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001080- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1081
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001082- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1083 module.
1084
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001085- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1086 installation scheme for all platforms.
1087
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001088- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001089 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001090
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001091- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1092 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1093 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1094
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001095- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1096 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1097 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1098
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001099- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1100
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001101- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1102
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001103- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1104 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1105
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001106- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1107 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1108 type pattern with the same value exists.
1109
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001110- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1111 when run from the command prompt).
1112
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001113- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1114 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1115
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001116- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1117 default sort).
1118
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001119- Added global runctx function to profile module
1120
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001121- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1122
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001123- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1124
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001125- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1126
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001127- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001128 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1129 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1130 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1131 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1132 accordingly.
1133
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001134- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1135 decoding standards.
1136
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001137- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1138 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1139 called for all requests.
1140
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001141- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1142 they are passed to the compiler.
1143
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001144- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1145 indent, width and depth.
1146
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001147- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1148 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1149
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001150- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1151 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1152
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001153- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1154
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001155- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1156
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001157- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1158
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001159- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1160 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1161
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001162- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001163 for better performance.
1164
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001165- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001166
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001167- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1168 a string).
1169
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001170- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1171
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001172- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1173
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001174- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1175
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001176- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1177
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001178- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1179 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1180 list of fieldnames.
1181
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001182- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1183 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1184
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001185- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1186
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001187- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1188 empty lists.
1189
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001190- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1191 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1192 and shelves.
1193
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001194- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1195 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1196
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001197- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001198 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1199 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001200
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001201- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1202 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001203 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001204
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001205- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001206 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1207 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1208
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001209- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1210 and removed in Py2.4.
1211
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001212- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1213
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001214- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1215
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001216Tools/Demos
1217-----------
1218
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001219- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1220 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1221
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001222- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1223
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001224- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1225 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1226 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1227 destination in situations where both files are given.
1228
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001229- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1230 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1231 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1232 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1233
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001234- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1235
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001236- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1237 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1238 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1239 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1240 now.
1241
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001242- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1243 in effect
1244
1245- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1246 C-c C-h
1247
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001248- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1249 -d option was given.
1250
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001251Build
1252-----
1253
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001254- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1255 build under OS X.
1256
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001257- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1258 --enable-profiling.
1259
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001260- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1261 is configured --with-tsc.
1262
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001263- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1264 on AMD64.
1265
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001266- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1267 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1268
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001269- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1270 removed.
1271
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001272- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1273 supported (see PEP 11).
1274
1275- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1276
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001277- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1278
1279- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1280 (see PEP 11).
1281
1282- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1283 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1284
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001285C API
1286-----
1287
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001288- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1289 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1290 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1291
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001292- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1293 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1294 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1295 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1296
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001297- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1298 generator objects.
1299
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001300- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1301 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001302 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1303 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001304
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001305- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1306 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1307
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001308- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1309 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1310 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1311 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1312 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1313
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001314- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1315 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1316 about 10% faster.
1317
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001318- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1319 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1320
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001321- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1322 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1323 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1324 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1325
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001326Windows
1327-------
1328
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001329- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1330 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1331 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1332 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1333
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001334- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1335 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1336 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1337
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001338
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001339What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1340===============================
1341
1342*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1343
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001344IDLE
1345----
1346
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001347- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1348 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1349 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1350 context-menu actions.
1351
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001352- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1353 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1354 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1355 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1356 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1357 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1358 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1359 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1360 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1361
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001362
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001363What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1364=============================================
1365
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001366*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001367
1368Core and builtins
1369-----------------
1370
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001371- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001372 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001373 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1374
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001375Extension modules
1376-----------------
1377
1378- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1379 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1380 than once. This has been fixed.
1381
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001382- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1383 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1384 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1385 call.
1386
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001387- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1388
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001389Library
1390-------
1391
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001392- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1393 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1394
1395- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1396 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1397 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1398 restored.
1399
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001400IDLE
1401----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001402
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001403- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001404
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001405Build
1406-----
1407
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001408- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1409 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1410
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001411C API
1412-----
1413
1414Windows
1415-------
1416
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001417- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1418 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1419
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001420- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1421
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001422Mac
1423---
1424
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001425- Various fixes to pimp.
1426
1427- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1428
1429- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1430 more problems than it solves.
1431
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001432
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001433What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1434=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001435
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001436*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1437
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001438Core and builtins
1439-----------------
1440
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001441- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1442 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1443
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001444- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1445 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001446 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001447
1448- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1449 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1450 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001451 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001452
1453- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1454 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001455
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001456- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1457 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1458 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1459
1460- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001461 770247.
1462
1463- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001464
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001465Extension modules
1466-----------------
1467
1468- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1469 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1470
1471- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1472
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001473- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1474
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001475- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1476 contained within the _strptime module.
1477
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001478- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1479 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1480
1481- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001482 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1483
1484- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1485 the find_class attribute, if present.
1486
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001487- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001488
1489 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1490 (SF bug 763298).
1491
1492 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001493 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1494 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1495 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001496
1497 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1498
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001499Library
1500-------
1501
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001502- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1503
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001504- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1505 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1506 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1507 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1508 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1509 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1510 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1511 or Tester().
1512
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001513- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1514 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1515 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1516 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1517 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1518 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1519 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1520 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1521 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001522
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001523 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001524
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001525- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1526 weren't before was an oversight.
1527
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001528- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1529 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1530
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001531- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1532 when there are no lines.
1533
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001534- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1535 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1536
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001537- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1538 to child processes.
1539
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001540- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1541
1542- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1543
1544- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1545 xmlrpclib.
1546
1547- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1548 responses.
1549
1550- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1551 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1552
1553- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1554 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1555 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1556
1557- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1558 used as patterns.
1559
1560- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1561 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1562 than Tk 8.3.
1563
1564- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1565
1566- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001567
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001568Tools/Demos
1569-----------
1570
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001571- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1572
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001573- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1574
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001575- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001576
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001577Build
1578-----
1579
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001580- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1581
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001582- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1583
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001584- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1585 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001586
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001587- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1588 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1589 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001590
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001591C API
1592-----
1593
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001594- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1595 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1596
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001597Windows
1598-------
1599
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001600- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1601 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1602 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1603 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1604 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1605 Python exception ::
1606
1607 thread.error: can't start new thread
1608
1609 is raised now.
1610
1611- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1612 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1613 instead of from DLL teardown.
1614
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001615Mac
1616---
1617
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001618- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001619 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001620 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1621 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1622 the executable in the bundle.
1623
1624- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001625
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001626- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1627
1628- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1629 on Panther.
1630
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001631What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1632================================
1633
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001634*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001635
1636Core and builtins
1637-----------------
1638
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001639- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1640 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1641 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1642 with the -i option.
1643
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001644- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1645 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1646
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001647- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1648 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1649
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001650- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1651 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1652 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1653 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1654 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1655 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1656 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1657 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1658 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1659 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1660 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1661 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1662 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001663
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001664- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1665 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1666 embedded in a lambda expression.
1667
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001668- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1669 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1670 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1671 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1672 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1673
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001674- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1675 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1676 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1677
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001678- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1679 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1680
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001681- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1682 It's writable again.
1683
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001684- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1685 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1686 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001687 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001688
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001689- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1690 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1691 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1692
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001693Extension modules
1694-----------------
1695
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001696- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1697 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1698
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001699- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1700 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1701 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1702 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1703
1704- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1705 collection.
1706
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001707- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1708 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1709 unique within a single program run.
1710
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001711- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1712 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1713
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001714- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1715 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1716
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001717- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1718 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001719
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001720- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1721
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001722- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1723 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1724
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001725- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1726 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1727 for many BSD-derived systems.
1728
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001729
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001730Library
1731-------
1732
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001733- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1734 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1735 primary ones:
1736
1737 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1738 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1739 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1740
1741 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1742 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1743 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1744 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1745 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1746 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1747
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001748- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1749 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1750 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1751 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1752 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1753 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1754 argument.
1755
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001756- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1757 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1758 in the archive.
1759
1760- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1761 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1762
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001763- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1764 569574).
1765
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001766- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1767 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1768 no more.
1769
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001770- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1771 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1772 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1773 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1774 code coverage.
1775
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001776- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1777 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1778 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001779 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1780 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001781
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001782- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1783 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1784 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001785 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001786
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001787- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1788
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001789- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1790 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1791 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1792 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1793
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001794- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1795 handling.
1796
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001797- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1798 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1799
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001800- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1801 in socket.py.
1802
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001803- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1804
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001805- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1806 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1807 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1808 opener with proxy support.
1809
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001810- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1811
1812- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1813
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001814Tools/Demos
1815-----------
1816
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001817- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1818
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001819- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1820
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001821- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1822 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001823
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001824- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1825 files.
1826
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001827Build
1828-----
1829
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001830- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001831 different root directory.
1832
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001833C API
1834-----
1835
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001836- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1837 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1838 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1839 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1840 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1841 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1842 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1843 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1844 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1845 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1846
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001847- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1848 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1849 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1850 from Python.
1851
1852
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001853New platforms
1854-------------
1855
1856None this time.
1857
1858Tests
1859-----
1860
1861- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1862 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1863
1864Windows
1865-------
1866
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001867- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1868
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001869- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1870 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1871 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1872 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1873 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1874 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1875 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1876 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1877 that's what it's for.
1878
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001879Mac
1880---
1881
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001882- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1883 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1884 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1885 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001886- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1887 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1888- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001889
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001890SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1891------------------------------------
1892
1893430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1894598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1895622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1896661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1897683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1898697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1899713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1900724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1901727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1902729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1903730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1904731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1905732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1906733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1907735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1908740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1909744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1910745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1911747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1912749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1913751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1914753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1915755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1916757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1917760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1918
1919
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001920What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1921================================
1922
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001923*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001924
1925Core and builtins
1926-----------------
1927
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001928- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1929 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1930
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001931- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1932 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1933 and cannot be strings).
1934
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001935- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1936 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1937 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1938 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1939
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001940- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1941 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1942 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1943 Python itself.
1944
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001945- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1946 the referenced object, if it has one.
1947
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001948- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1949 the thread started at
1950 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1951
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001952- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1953 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1954 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1955 placed on a list index.
1956
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001957- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1958 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1959 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1960 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1961
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001962- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1963 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1964 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1965 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1966 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1967 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1968 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1969
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001970- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1971 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1972 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1973 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1974 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1975
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001976- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1977 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001978
1979- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1980 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1981 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1982 #693195.)
1983
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001984- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1985 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001986
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001987- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001988 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001989 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1990 interpreter executions, would fail.
1991
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001992- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001993 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001994 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001995
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001996Extension modules
1997-----------------
1998
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001999- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2000 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2001 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2002 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2003
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002004- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2005 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2006
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002007- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2008 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2009 and Greg Chapman.)
2010
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002011- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2012 recursively.
2013
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002014- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002015 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2016 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2017 leaks.
2018
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002019- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2020
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002021- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2022 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2023 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2024 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2025 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2026 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2027 #705836.
2028
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002029- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002030 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2031
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002032- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2033 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2034 See SF bug #692416.
2035
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002036- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2037 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2038
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002039- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2040 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2041 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002042
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002043- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002044 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2045 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2046
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002047- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2048 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2049 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2050 timeouts to work properly.
2051
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002052Library
2053-------
2054
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002055- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2056 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2057 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2058 future release.
2059
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002060- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2061 for querying platform dependent features.
2062
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002063- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002064
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002065- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2066 pickle protocol versions.
2067
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002068- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2069 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2070 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2071
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002072- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2073
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002074- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2075 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2076 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2077 modules.
2078
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002079- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2080 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2081 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2082
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002083- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2084 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2085
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002086- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2087 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2088 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2089
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002090- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002091 MS Office extensions.
2092
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002093- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2094 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2095
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002096- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2097 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2098
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002099- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2100 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2101 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2102 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2103 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2104 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2105
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002106- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2107 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2108 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002109
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002110- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2111 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2112 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2113
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002114- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2115
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002116- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2117 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2118 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2119
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002120Tools/Demos
2121-----------
2122
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002123- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2124 See the module docstring for details.
2125
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002126Build
2127-----
2128
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002129- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2130 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002131
2132C API
2133-----
2134
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002135- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2136
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002137- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2138 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2139 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2140
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002141- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2142 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002143
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002144 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2145 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2146 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002147
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002148- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002149 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2150
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002151- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2152 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2153 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002154
2155New platforms
2156-------------
2157
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002158None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002159
2160Tests
2161-----
2162
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002163- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2164 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002165
2166Windows
2167-------
2168
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002169- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2170 function.
2171
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002172- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2173 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002174
2175Mac
2176---
2177
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002178- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2179 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002180
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002181- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2182 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002183
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002184- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2185 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2186 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002187
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002188- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002189 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2190 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002191
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002192- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2193 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002194
2195
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002196What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2197=================================
2198
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002199*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002200
2201Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002202-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002203
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002204- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2205 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2206 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2207
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002208- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2209 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2210 (SF patch #664376.)
2211
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002212- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2213 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2214 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2215 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2216 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2217 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002218 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002219
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002220- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2221 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2222 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2223 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002224 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002225
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002226- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2227 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2228 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2229 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2230 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2231 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2232 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2233 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2234 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2235 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2236 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2237
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002238- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2239 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2240 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2241 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2242 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2243 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2244
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002245- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2246 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2247
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002248- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2249 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2250 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2251 case.)
2252
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002253- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2254 passed as unicode strings.
2255
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002256- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2257 See SF bug #683467.
2258
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002259- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2260 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2261
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002262- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2263
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002264- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2265
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002266- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2267 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2268 arguments.
2269
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002270- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2271 See SF bug #667147.
2272
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002273- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002274 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002275 See SF bug #676155.
2276
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002277- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002278 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002279 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2280 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2281 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2282 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2283 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2284 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002285
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002286Extension modules
2287-----------------
2288
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002289- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2290 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2291 tp_as_number pointer.
2292
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002293- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2294 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2295 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2296 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2297 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2298
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002299- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2300
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002301- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2302
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002303- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002304 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002305 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2306 patch #678531.)
2307
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002308- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2309 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2310
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002311- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2312 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2313
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002314- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2315
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002316- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2317 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2318 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2319
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002320- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2321
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002322- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2323 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2324
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002325- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002326
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002327- datetime changes:
2328
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002329 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2330
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002331 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2332 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2333 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2334 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2335 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2336 now.
2337
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002338 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002339 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2340 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002341
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002342 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002343 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002344 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2345 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2346 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2347 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002348
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002349 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2350 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2351 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002352 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2353
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002354 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2355 by a later example coded by Guido.
2356
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002357 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002358 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2359 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2360 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002361 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2362 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2363
2364 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2365 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2366 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2367 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2368 tzinfo subclass instance.
2369
2370 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2371 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2372 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2373 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2374 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2375 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2376 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2377 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002378
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002379 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2380 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2381 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2382 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2383 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002384 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2385
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002386 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002387
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002388 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2389 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2390 as a naive datetime object.
2391
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002392 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2393 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2394 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2395
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002396 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2397 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2398 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2399 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2400 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2401 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2402 comparison.
2403
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002404 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2405 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2406 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2407 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002408 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002409
2410 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002411
2412 and ::
2413
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002414 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2415
2416 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2417 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2418 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2419 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2420
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002421 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2422 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2423 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2424 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2425 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2426
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002427 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2428 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002429 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2430 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002431
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002432Library
2433-------
2434
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002435- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2436 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2437
2438- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2439 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2440 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2441 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2442 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2443 See PEP 307 for details.
2444
2445- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2446 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2447
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002448- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2449 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002450 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002451 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2452 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002453 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002454
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002455- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2456 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2457
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002458- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2459 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2460 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2461
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002462- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2463
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002464- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2465 exception.
2466
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002467- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2468 class.
2469
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002470- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2471 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2472 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2473
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002474- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2475 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2476
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002477- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002478 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2479 See SF bug #659228.
2480
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002481- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2482 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2483 See SF patch #651082.
2484
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002485- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002486
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002487- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2488 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2489
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002490- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002491 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002492
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002493- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2494 DOS paths from other platforms.
2495
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002496Tools/Demos
2497-----------
2498
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002499- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2500 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2501 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2502 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2503 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2504 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2505 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2506 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2507 example:
2508
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002509 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2510 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002511
2512 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2513
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002514
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002515Build
2516-----
2517
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002518- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2519 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2520 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002521 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2522
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002523 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2524
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002525- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2526 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2527 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2528 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2529 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2530 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2531 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2532 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2533 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2534
2535- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2536 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2537 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2538 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2539
2540- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2541 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2542
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002543C API
2544-----
2545
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002546- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2547 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002548
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002549- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2550 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2551 tp_as_number pointer.
2552
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002553- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2554 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2555 (SF #681367)
2556
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002557- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2558 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2559 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2560 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002561
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002562Tests
2563-----
2564
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002565- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002566 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2567 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2568 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2569 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2570 pydoc.)
2571
2572- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2573
2574- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002575
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002576Windows
2577-------
2578
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002579- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2580 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2581 time).
2582
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002583- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2584 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2585
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002586- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2587 release without strong cryptography.
2588
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002589- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002590 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002591
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002592- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2593 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2594
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002595Mac
2596---
2597
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002598- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2599 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002600
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002601- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2602 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2603 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002604
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002605- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2606 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002607
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002608- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2609 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2610 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2611 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002612
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002613- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002614 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2615 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2616 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002617
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002618
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002619What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002620=================================
2621
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002622*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002623
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002624Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002625--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002626
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002627- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2628
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002629- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2630 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002631 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002632 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002633 a different meaning than before.
2634
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002635- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002636 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002637 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002638
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002639- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002640 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002641 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002642
2643- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2644 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2645 and deallocation.
2646
2647- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2648 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2649
2650- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2651 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2652 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2653 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2654 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2655
2656- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2657 now detected by the garbage collector.
2658
2659- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2660 [SF bug 519621]
2661
2662- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2663 identifier.
2664
2665- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2666 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2667 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2668 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2669 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2670 [SF bug 563060]
2671
2672- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2673 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2674 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2675 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2676 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2677
2678- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2679 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2680 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2681
2682- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2683
2684- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2685 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2686 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2687 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2688 state of the slots would be lost.)
2689
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002690Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002691-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002692
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002693- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002694 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2695 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2696 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2697 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002698 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2699 Jython 2.1.
2700
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002701- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002702 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002703 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2704 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2705 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2706 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2707 these, see PEP 302.
2708
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002709- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2710 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2711 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2712
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002713- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2714 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2715 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2716
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002717- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2718 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2719 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2720
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002721- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2722 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2723 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2724 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2725 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2726 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2727 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2728 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2729 releases or implementations.
2730
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002731- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002732 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2733 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002734
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002735- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2736 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2737
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002738- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2739 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2740 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2741
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002742- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2743 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2744
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002745- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2746 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002747 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2748 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002749
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002750- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2751 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2752 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2753 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2754 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2755
2756 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2757 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2758 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2759 pattern.
2760
2761 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2762 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2763 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2764 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2765
2766 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2767 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2768 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2769 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2770 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2771 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2772
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002773- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2774 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2775 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2776 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2777 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2778 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2779 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2780 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002781
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002782- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2783 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2784 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2785 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2786 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002787 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2788 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2789 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2790 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2791 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2792 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2793 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002794
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002795- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2796 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2797
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002798- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2799 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2800 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2801 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2802 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2803 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2804 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2805 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2806 to Zack Weinberg!
2807
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002808- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2809 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2810 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2811 type. This has been fixed now.
2812
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002813- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2814 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2815 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2816
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002817- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2818 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2819 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2820 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2821 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2822 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2823 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2824 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002825 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002826
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002827- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2828 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2829 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002830
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002831- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2832 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2833 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2834 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2835 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2836 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2837 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2838 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002839 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002840 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2841 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2842
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002843- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2844 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2845 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2846 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2847 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2848 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2849 this.)
2850
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002851- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2852 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002853 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002854 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002855 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2856 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002857 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2858 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002859
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002860- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2861 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2862 currently running.
2863
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002864- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2865 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2866 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2867 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2868
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002869- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2870 as directory names.
2871
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002872- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2873 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2874
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002875- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2876 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2877
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002878- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002879 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2880 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002881
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002882- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2883 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2884 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2885 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2886 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2887
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002888- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2889 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2890 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2891 removed.
2892
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002893- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2894 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2895 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2896
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002897- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2898 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2899 to __debug__.
2900
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002901- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2902 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2903 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2904
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002905- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2906 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2907 deprecated now.
2908
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002909- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2910 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2911 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002912
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002913- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2914 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2915 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2916 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2917 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002918
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002919- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2920 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2921
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002922- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2923 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2924 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002925 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002926 is backward compatible.
2927
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002928- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2929 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2930 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2931 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2932 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2933
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002934- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2935 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2936 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2937 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2938 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2939 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002940
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002941- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2942 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2943
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002944- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2945 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2946
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002947- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2948 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2949 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2950 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2951 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2952
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002953- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2954 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2955 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2956
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002957- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002958 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2959
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002960- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2961 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2962 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002963
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002964- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2965 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2966
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002967- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2968 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2969 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2970
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002971- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2972
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002973Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002974-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002975
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002976- Added three operators to the operator module:
2977 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2978 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2979 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2980
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002981- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2982
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002983- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2984 archives.
2985
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002986- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2987 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2988 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2989
2990 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2991
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002992- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2993 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2994 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002995 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002996
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002997- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2998 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2999 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3000 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003001 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3002 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3003 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3004 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003005
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003006- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3007 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003008
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003009- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3010
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003011- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3012 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3013
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003014- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3015 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3016 supported.
3017
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003018- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3019
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003020- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3021 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003022
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003023- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3024 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3025
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003026- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3027
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003028- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3029 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3030
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003031- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3032 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3033 functions but callable type objects.
3034
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003035- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003036 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003037 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003038
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003039- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3040 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003041
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003042- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3043 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003044
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003045- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3046 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3047 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3048 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3049
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003050- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3051 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003052
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003053- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3054 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3055 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3056 and __imul__.
3057
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003058- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003059 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3060 is called.
3061
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003062- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3063 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3064 interpreter was compiled.
3065
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003066- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3067 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3068 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003069 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003070 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3071 1, not 2.
3072
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003073- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3074 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3075 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3076 limit.
3077
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003078- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3079 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3080 bug #623464.
3081
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003082- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3083 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3084 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3085 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3086
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003087Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003088-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003089
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003090- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3091
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003092- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3093 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3094 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3095 with Python 2.3a2.
3096
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003097- os.path exposes getctime.
3098
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003099- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003100 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003101 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003102 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003103 unit tests of floating point results.
3104
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003105- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3106 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3107 has been increased.
3108
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003109- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3110 executed.
3111
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003112- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3113 postinstallation script.
3114
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003115- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3116 test the current module.
3117
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003118- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003119 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3120 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3121 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3122 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3123
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003124- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003125 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003126 Ward's Optik package.
3127
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003128- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3129 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3130 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3131 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3132
3133- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3134 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003135 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003136
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003137- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3138 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3139 shelf are binary pickles.
3140
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003141- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3142 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3143
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003144- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3145 modules are iterators now.
3146
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003147- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3148 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3149 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3150 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3151 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3152 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003153
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003154- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3155 with their entity value.
3156
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003157- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3158
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003159- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3160 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003161
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003162- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3163 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003164 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003165
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003166- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3167 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3168 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3169 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3170 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3171 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3172 main():
3173
3174 import locale
3175 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3176
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003177- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3178 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3179
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003180- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3181 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3182 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3183 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3184 to the new standard.
3185
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003186- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3187 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3188 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3189 an extension to the database.
3190
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003191- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3192 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3193 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3194 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003195 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003196
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003197- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003198 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003199
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003200- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3201 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3202 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3203 bounded integers.
3204
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003205- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3206 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3207 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3208 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3209 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3210 in existence.
3211
3212 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3213 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3214 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3215 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3216 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3217 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3218
3219 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3220 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3221 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3222 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3223
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003224- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3225 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3226 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3227
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003228- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3229
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003230- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3231 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3232 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3233 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3234
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003235- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3236 argument.
3237
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003238- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3239 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3240 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3241 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3242 [SF patch 560794].
3243
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003244- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3245 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3246 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003247 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3248 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3249 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003250
3251- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3252 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003253
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003254- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3255 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3256 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3257 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003258
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003259- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3260 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3261 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3262 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3263 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3264
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003265- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003266
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003267- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3268
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003269- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3270 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3271 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3272 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3273 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3274 identical to None.
3275
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003276- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3277 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3278 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3279 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3280 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3281 results now.
3282
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003283- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3284 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3285
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003286- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3287 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3288 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3289 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3290 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3291 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3292 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3293 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3294
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003295- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3296
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003297- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3298 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3299
3300- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3301 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3302 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3303 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3304 and other systems.
3305
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003306- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3307 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3308 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3309 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 +00003310 work well with these.
3311
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003312- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3313
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003314- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003315 connections.
3316
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003317- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3318 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3319 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3320
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003321- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3322 sets
3323
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003324- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3325 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3326 name.
3327
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003328- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3329 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3330 passed in.
3331
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003332- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003333 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003334 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3335 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003336
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003337- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3338
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003339- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3340
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003341- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3342 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3343 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3344
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003345- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3346 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3347 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3348 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003349 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003350
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003351- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003352 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003353 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003354
3355- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3356 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3357 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3358
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003359- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003360 the value of its expression argument.
3361
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003362- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3363 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3364 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3365
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003366- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3367 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3368 skipstone browser was included.
3369
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003370- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3371 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3372
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003373Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003374-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003375
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003376- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3377 names in addition to accepting file names.
3378
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003379- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3380 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3381 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3382 still used and useful.)
3383
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003384- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3385 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3386 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3387 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003388
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003389- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3390 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3391 the generated binary.
3392
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003393Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003394-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003395
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003396- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3397
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003398- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3399 except in the hands of experts.
3400
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003401- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003402 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3403 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3404 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003405
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003406- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3407 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3408 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3409 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3410 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3411 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3412 builds.
3413
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003414- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3415 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3416 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3417 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3418 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3419 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3420 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3421 new type.
3422
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003423- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003424
3425 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3426 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3427 positive infinities.
3428
3429 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3430 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3431 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3432 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3433 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3434 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3435 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3436
3437 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3438
3439 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3440
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003441- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3442 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3443 size of the executable.
3444
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003445- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3446 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3447 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3448 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003449
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003450- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3451
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003452- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3453 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3454 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003455
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003456- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3457 well as Unix.
3458
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003459- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3460 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3461 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3462 modules in the README file for details.
3463
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003464C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003465-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003466
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003467- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3468 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003469 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003470 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003471 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003472
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003473- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3474 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3475 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3476 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3477 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3478 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003479 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003480 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3481 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3482 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3483 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3484 aligned.)
3485
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003486- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3487 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3488 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3489
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003490- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3491 level.
3492
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003493- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3494 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3495 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3496 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3497 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3498
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003499- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3500 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3501 code.
3502
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003503- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3504 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3505 adjusting for negative indices.
3506
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003507- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3508 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3509 object.
3510
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003511- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3512 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3513 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3514
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003515- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3516 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003517
3518- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3519
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003520- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3521 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3522 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3523 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3524
3525- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3526
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003527- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003528
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003529- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003530 without going through the buffer API.
3531
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003532- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003533
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003534- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3535 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3536 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3537 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3538
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003539- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3540 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3541
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003542- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003543 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3544
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003545New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003546-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003547
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003548- OpenVMS is now supported.
3549
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003550- AtheOS is now supported.
3551
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003552- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3553
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003554- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3555
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003556Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003557-----
3558
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003559- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3560 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3561 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003562
3563Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003564-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003565
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003566- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3567 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3568 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3569 bugs.
3570 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003571 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003572 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3573 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003574 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003575
3576- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003577 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003578
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003579- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3580 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3581
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003582- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3583 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003584 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003585 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3586
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003587- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3588 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3589 use files" uninstall option).
3590
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003591- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3592
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003593- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3594 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3595
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003596- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3597 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3598 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3599
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003600- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3601 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3602 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3603 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3604 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003605 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3606 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3607 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003608
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003609- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003610 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003611 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3612 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3613 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3614 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3615 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3616 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3617 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3618 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3619 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3620 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3621 work around.
3622
3623- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3624 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3625 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3626 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3627 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3628 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3629 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3630 specified with O_CREAT too).
3631
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003632Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003633----
3634
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003635- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003636
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003637- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3638 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3639 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3640
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003641- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3642 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3643 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3644
3645- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3646 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3647 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3648 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3649 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3650 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3651 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3652 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003653
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003654- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3655 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3656 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003657
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003658- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3659 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3660 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3661 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3662 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003663
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003664- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3665 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3666 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003667
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003668- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3669 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003670
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003671- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3672 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3673 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3674 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3675 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003676
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003677- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3678 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3679 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3680
3681- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3682 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3683 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003684
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003685- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3686 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3687 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3688 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003689 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003690
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003691- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3692 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003693
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003694- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3695 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003696
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003697- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003698 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003699 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3700 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003701
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003702
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003703What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003704===============================
3705
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003706*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3707
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003708Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003709--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003710
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003711- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3712 with a custom metaclass.
3713
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003714Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003715-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003716
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003717- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3718 are proxies.
3719
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003720Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003721-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003722
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003723- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3724 very short strings.
3725
3726- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3727 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3728 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3729 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3730 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3731
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003732Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003733-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003734
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003735- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3736 close or delete time).
3737
3738- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3739 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3740
3741- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3742
3743- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003744 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003745
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003746Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003747-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003748
3749Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003750-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003751
3752C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003753-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003754
3755New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003756-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003757
3758Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003759-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003760
3761Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003762-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003763
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003764- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3765
3766- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3767 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3768
3769- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3770 deleted at process exit time.
3771
3772- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3773 in backslash.
3774
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003775Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003776----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003777
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003778- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3779 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3780 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3781
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003782
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003783What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003784===========================
3785
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003786*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3787
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003788Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003789--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003790
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003791- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3792 been extensively updated. See
3793
3794 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3795
3796 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3797
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003798- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3799 deleted!
3800
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003801- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3802 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3803 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3804 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3805 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3806
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003807- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3808
3809 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3810 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3811
3812 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3813 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3814 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3815 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3816 supported anyway.
3817
3818 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3819 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3820
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003821- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3822 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3823 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3824 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3825 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003826
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003827- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3828 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3829 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3830
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003831Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003832-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003833
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003834- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3835 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3836 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3837 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3838 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3839 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003840 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3841 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3842 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3843 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003844
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003845- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3846 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3847 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3848
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003849Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003850-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003851
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003852- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3853
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003854Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003855-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003856
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003857- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3858 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3859 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3860 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3861 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3862 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3863
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003864- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3865
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003866- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3867
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003868- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3869
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003870- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3871 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3872 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3873
3874- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3875
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003876Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003877-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003878
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003879- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3880 off a search on Google.
3881
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003882Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003883-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003884
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003885- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3886 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3887 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3888 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3889 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3890 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3891 other platforms should do likewise.
3892
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003893- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3894 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3895 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3896
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003897C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003898-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003899
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003900- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3901 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3902 producing key-value pairs.
3903
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003904- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003905 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003906 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3907 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3908 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3909 previously went unchallenged.
3910
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003911New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003912-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003913
3914Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003915-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003916
3917Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003918-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003919
3920Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003921----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003922
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003923- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3924 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003925
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003926- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3927 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3928 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3929 home.
3930
3931
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003932What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003933===========================
3934
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003935*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3936
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003937Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003938--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003939
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003940- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3941 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003942
3943 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003944 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003945
3946 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3947 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003948 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003949 This needs to be documented.
3950
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003951- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3952 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3953
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003954- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3955 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3956 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3957
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003958- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3959 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3960
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003961- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3962 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3963 class forbids it).
3964
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003965- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3966 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3967 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3968
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003969- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3970
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003971Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003972-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003973
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003974- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3975 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003976 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003977
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003978- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3979 (like 1 + '').
3980
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003981Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003982-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003983
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003984- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3985 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3986 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3987 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003988 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003989 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3990
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003991- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3992 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3993 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3994 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3995
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003996- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3997 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003998 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3999 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4000 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004001
4002- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4003 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004004
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004005- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4006 bytes on its input.
4007
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004008Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004009-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004010
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004011- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004012 convenience function.
4013
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004014- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4015 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4016 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004017 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4018 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4019 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4020 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4021 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4022 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004023
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004024- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4025 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4026 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4027 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4028
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004029- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4030 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4031 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4032
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004033- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4034 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4035 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4036 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4037
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004038- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4039 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004040 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004041 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4042 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4043 new -l and -e options.
4044
4045- statcache is now deprecated.
4046
4047- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4048 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004049 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004050 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4051 time properly taken into account.
4052
4053- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4054 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4055 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4056 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4057
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004058Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004059-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004060
4061Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004062-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004063
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004064- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4065 is built with libdb3 if available.
4066
4067- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4068
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004069C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004070-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004071
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004072- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4073 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4074 PySequence_Size().
4075
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004076- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4077
4078- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4079 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4080 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4081
4082- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4083 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4084
4085- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4086 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4087
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004088New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004089-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004090
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004091- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4092 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4093
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004094- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4095 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4096
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004097- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4098
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004099Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004100-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004101
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004102- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4103 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4104
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004105Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004106-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004107
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004108Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004109----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004110
4111- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4112 removed completely in the next release.
4113
4114- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4115 OSX.
4116
4117- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4118 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4119
4120- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4121
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004122
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004123What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004124===========================
4125
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004126*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4127
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004128Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004129--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004130
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004131- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004132 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004133 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004134 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4135 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004136 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4137 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004138 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4139 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004140
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004141- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4142 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4143
4144- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4145 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4146
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004147Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004148-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004149
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004150- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4151 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4152 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4153 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4154 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4155 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4156 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4157 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4158
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004159- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4160 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4161 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4162 example).
4163
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004164- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004165 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004166 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004167 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004168
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004169- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4170 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4171 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004172 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004173
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004174- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4175 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4176 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4177 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4178 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4179 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4180
4181 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4182
4183 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4184
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004185Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004186-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004187
4188- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4189
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004190- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4191
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004192- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4193 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004194
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004195- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4196 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4197 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4198 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4199 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4200 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004201 attributes.
4202
4203- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4204 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4205 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004206
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004207- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4208 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4209 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004210
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004211- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4212 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4213 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004214 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4215 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4216
4217- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4218 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004219
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004220Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004221-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004222
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004223- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4224 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4225
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004226- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4227 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4228 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4229 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4230
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004231- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4232 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4233 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4234 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4235
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004236 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4237 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4238 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4239 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4240 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4241 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4242 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4243 without losing information).
4244
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004245- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004246 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4247 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4248 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4249 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4250 module).
4251
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004252 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004253 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4254 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4255 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4256 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004257
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004258- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004259 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4260 encoding.
4261
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004262- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4263 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4264
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004265- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004266 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4267
4268- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4269 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4270 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4271 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4272
4273- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4274
4275- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4276 ON, and OFF.
4277
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004278- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4279 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4280
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004281Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004282-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004283
4284- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4285 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4286 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004287
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004288- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4289 been added: -X and -E.
4290
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004291Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004292-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004293
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004294- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4295 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4296
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004297C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004298-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004299
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004300- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4301 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4302 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4303 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4304 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4305
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004306- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4307 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4308 as long) arguments.
4309
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004310- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4311 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4312 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4313 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4314 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4315 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4316
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004317- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4318 input.
4319
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004320New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004321-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004322
4323Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004324-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004325
4326Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004327-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004328
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004329- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4330 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4331 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4332
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004333- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4334 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4335 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004336 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004337
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004338 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4339 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4340 import signal
4341 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004342
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004343 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004344 while 1:
4345 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004346 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004347 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4348 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4349 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4350 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004351
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004352
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004353What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4354===========================
4355
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004356*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4357
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004358Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004359--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004360
4361- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4362 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4363 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4364
4365- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4366 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4367 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4368 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4369 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4370 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4371 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004372
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004373- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004374 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004375 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4376 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4377 associate a docstring with a property.
4378
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004379- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4380 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4381 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4382 other built-in object types.
4383
4384- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4385 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4386 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4387 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4388 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4389
4390- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4391 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4392
4393- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4394 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004395 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004396 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4397 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4398 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4399 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4400 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4401
4402- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4403 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4404 class.
4405
4406- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4407 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4408 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4409 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4410
4411- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4412 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4413 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4414 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4415
4416- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4417 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4418
4419- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4420 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4421 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4422 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4423 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004424 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004425 with the same value as s.
4426
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004427- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4428
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004429Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004430----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004431
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004432- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4433
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004434- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4435 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4436 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4437 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4438 objects.
4439
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004440- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4441 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004442 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4443 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4444
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004445- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4446 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4447 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4448
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004449Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004450-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004451
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004452- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4453 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4454 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4455 by the instances.
4456
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004457- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4458 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4459 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4460
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004461- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4462 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4463 before the entire comparison is complete.
4464
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004465- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4466 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4467 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4468
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004469- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4470 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4471 getwriter().
4472
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004473- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4474 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4475
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004476- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004477 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4478 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4479
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004480- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4481 iterable object.
4482
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004483- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4484 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004485
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004486- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4487 authentication.
4488
4489- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4490 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004491
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004492- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004493 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4494 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4495 a sample driver.)
4496
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004497Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004498-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004499
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004500- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4501 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4502 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4503 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4504 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4505 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4506 kernel has large file support.
4507
4508- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4509 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4510 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4511 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4512 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4513
4514- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4515 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4516 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4517
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004518C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004519-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004520
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004521- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4522 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4523
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004524New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004525-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004526
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004527- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4528 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4529
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004530Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004531-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004532
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004533- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4534 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4535 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4536 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4537 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4538
4539- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4540 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4541 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4542 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4543
4544- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4545 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4546
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004547Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004548-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004549
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004550- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004551 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4552 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004553
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004554
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004555What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4556===========================
4557
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004558*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4559
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004560Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004561----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004562
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004563- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4564 big to represent as a C double.
4565
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004566- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4567 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4568 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4569 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4570 restriction).
4571
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004572- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4573 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4574 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4575 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4576 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4577
4578 >>> dir([])
4579 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4580 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4581 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4582 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4583 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4584 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4585 'reverse', 'sort']
4586
4587 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4588
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004589- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004590 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4591 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4592 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4593 OverflowError exception.
4594
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004595- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004596 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004597 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4598 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4599 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4600 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4601 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004602 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004603 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4604 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4605
4606 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4607 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4608 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4609 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004610
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004611- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004612 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4613 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4614 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4615 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4616 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4617 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4618 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4619 once it is created.
4620
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004621- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4622 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4623 (key, value) pairs.
4624
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004625- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004626 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4627 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4628
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004629- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4630 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4631 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4632 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4633 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004634
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004635- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004636 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4637 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4638
4639 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4640
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004641- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004642 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4643
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004644Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004645-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004646
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004647- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004648 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4649 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004650
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004651- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4652 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4653 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4654 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4655 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4656 in this area anymore).
4657
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004658- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4659 threading.Timer.
4660
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004661- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4662 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4663
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004664- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004665 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4666
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004667- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004668 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4669 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4670 converted to Python longs.
4671
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004672- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004673 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4674
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004675- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4676 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4677 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4678
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004679Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004680-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004681
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004682- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4683 division operators as per PEP 238.
4684
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004685Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004686-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004687
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004688- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4689 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4690 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4691 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4692
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004693C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004694-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004695
4696- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004697
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004698- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4699 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004700 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004701
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004702 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4703 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004704 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004705 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004706
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004707- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004708 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4709 module:
4710
4711 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004712
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004713 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4714 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004715
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004716 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4717 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004718
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004719 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4720
4721 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4722
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004723- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004724 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4725 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4726 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004727
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004728New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004729-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004730
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004731- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4732 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4733 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4734 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4735 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004736
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004737Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004738-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004739
4740Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004741-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004742
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004743- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4744 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4745 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4746 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004747 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4748 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4749 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4750 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4751 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004752
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004753- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004754 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4755
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004756
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004757What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4758===========================
4759
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004760*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4761
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004762Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004763-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004764
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004765- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4766 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4767
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004768- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4769 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4770 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004771
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004772- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4773 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4774 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4775 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004776
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004777- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4778
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004779- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004780
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004781Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004782-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004783
4784- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004785 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004786 the module docstring for details.
4787
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004788Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004789-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004790
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004791- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004792 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4793 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4794 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004795
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004796- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4797 Nick Mathewson.
4798
4799Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004800----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004801
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004802- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4803 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4804 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4805 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4806 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4807 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4808 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4809 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4810
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004811- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4812 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4813 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4814 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4815
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004816- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4817 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4818 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4819 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4820 come a long way).
4821
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004822- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4823 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4824 write filters for these warnings).
4825
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004826- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4827 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4828 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4829 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4830 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4831
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004832- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4833 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4834 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4835 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4836 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4837 older distribution.
4838
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004839Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004840-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004841
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004842- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4843 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004844 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004845
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004846- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4847 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4848 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4849
4850- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4851
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004852- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4853
4854- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4855
4856- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4857
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004858- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004859
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004860- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4861
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004862New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004863-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004864
4865C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004866-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004867
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004868- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4869 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4870 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4871 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4872 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4873 against buffer overruns.
4874
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004875- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004876 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4877 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004878 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4879 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4880 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4881
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004882- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4883 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4884 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4885 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4886 deprecated.
4887
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004888Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004889-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004890
4891- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4892 relevant is found.
4893
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004894
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004895What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004896===========================
4897
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004898*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4899
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004900Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004901----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004902
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004903- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4904 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4905 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4906 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4907 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4908 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4909 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4910 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004911 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004912 repaired.
4913
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004914- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004915 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004916 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4917 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4918 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4919 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4920 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4921 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4922 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4923 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4924
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004925- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4926 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4927 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4928 leading BMO character).
4929
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004930- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4931 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4932 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4933
4934 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4935 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4936 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004937
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004938 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4939 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4940 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4941 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4942 for various simple to use conversions.
4943
4944 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4945 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4946
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004947 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4948 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4949 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4950 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4951 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4952 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4953 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4954 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4955 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4956 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4957 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4958 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4959 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4960 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4961 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004962
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004963- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4964 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4965 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004966 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004967 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004968
4969 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004970 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4971 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4972 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4973 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4974 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004975 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4976 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004977
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004978 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4979 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4980 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004981 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004982
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004983- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4984 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4985 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4986 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4987 floating arithmetic,
4988
4989 x = 9007199254740992.0
4990 print long(x)
4991
4992 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4993 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4994 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4995 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4996 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4997 functions are of good quality).
4998
4999 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5000 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5001 algorithms to break.
5002
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005003- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5004 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5005 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5006 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5007 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5008 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5009 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5010 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5011 order.
5012
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005013- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5014 operation along the most common code paths.
5015
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005016- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5017 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5018
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005019- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5020 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5021 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5022 {}.update(UserDict())
5023
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005024- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5025 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5026 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5027 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5028 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5029 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5030 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5031 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5032
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005033- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005034 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005035
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005036 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005037 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5038 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005039 join() method of strings
5040 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005041 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5042 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005043 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005044 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005045
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005046- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5047 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5048
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005049- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5050 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5051
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005052- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5053 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5054 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5055 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5056
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005057- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5058 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005059 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005060 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5061 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005062
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005063- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5064
5065
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005066Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005067-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005068
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005069- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005070 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005071 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5072 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5073
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005074- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5075 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5076
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005077- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5078 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5079 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5080 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5081
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005082- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5083 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5084 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5085
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005086- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5087
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005088- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5089
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005090- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5091 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5092 that are still imported into string.py).
5093
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005094- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5095
5096- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5097 Now it does.
5098
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005099- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5100
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005101- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5102 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5103 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5104 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5105 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005106 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5107 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005108
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005109- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5110 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5111 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5112 'help(object)'.
5113
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005114Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005115-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005116
5117- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005118 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005119 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5120 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5121
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005122- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005123 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5124 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005125
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005126C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005127-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005128
5129- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5130 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005131
5132----
5133
5134**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**