blob: 97da8e3b512bd6a3c93d9e9bf0132d1800356941 [file] [log] [blame]
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
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000011
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +000015- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
16 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
17
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +000018- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
19
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +000020- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
21
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +000022- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
23 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
24 arguments.
25
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +000026- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
27 See SF bug #667147.
28
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +000029- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +000030 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +000031 See SF bug #676155.
32
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +000033- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +000034 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +000035 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
36 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
37 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
38 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
39 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
40 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +000041
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000042Extension modules
43-----------------
44
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +000045- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +000046 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +000047 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
48 patch #678531.)
49
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +000050- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
51 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
52
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +000053- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
54 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
55
Martin v. Löwis9789aef2003-01-26 11:30:36 +000056- A new module _iconv_codec has been added, to expose the iconv(3)
57 library.
58
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +000059- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
60
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +000061- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
62 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
63 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
64
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000065- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
66
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +000067- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
68 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
69
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +000070- datetime changes:
71
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +000072 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
73 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
74 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
75 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
76 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
77 now.
78
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +000079 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +000080 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
81 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +000082
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +000083 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +000084 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +000085 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
86 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
87 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
88 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +000089
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +000090 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
91 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
92 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +000093 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
94
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +000095 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
96 by a later example coded by Guido.
97
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +000098 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +000099 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
100 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
101 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000102 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
103 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
104
105 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
106 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
107 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
108 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
109 tzinfo subclass instance.
110
111 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
112 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
113 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
114 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
115 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
116 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
117 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
118 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000119
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000120 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
121 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
122 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
123 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
124 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
125 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to
126 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
127 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
128 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
129 as a naive datetime object.
130
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000131 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
132 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
133 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
134
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000135 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
136 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
137 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
138 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
139 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
140 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
141 comparison.
142
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000143 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
144 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
145 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
146 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
147 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
148
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000149 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
150 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000151 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
152 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000153
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000154Library
155-------
156
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000157- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
158 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
159
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000160- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
161 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
162 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
163
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000164- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
165
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000166- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
167 exception.
168
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000169- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
170 class.
171
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000172- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
173 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
174 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
175
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000176- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
177 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
178
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000179- realpath is now exported when doing from poxixpath import *.
180 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
181 See SF bug #659228.
182
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000183- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
184 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
185 See SF patch #651082.
186
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000187- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000188
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000189- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
190 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
191
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000192- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000193 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000194
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000195Tools/Demos
196-----------
197
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000198- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
199 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
200 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
201 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
202 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
203 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
204 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
205 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
206 example:
207
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000208 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
209 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000210
211 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
212
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000213
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000214Build
215-----
216
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000217- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
218 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
219 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
220 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
221 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
222 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
223 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
224 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
225 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
226
227- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
228 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
229 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
230 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
231
232- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
233 from the Tools/scripts directory.
234
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000235C API
236-----
237
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000238- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
239 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
240 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
241 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000242
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000243
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000244New platforms
245-------------
246
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000247TBD
248
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000249Tests
250-----
251
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000252TBD
253
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000254Windows
255-------
256
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000257- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
258 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
259
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000260- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
261 release without strong cryptography.
262
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000263- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
264 absolute pathname.
265
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000266- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
267 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
268
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000269Mac
270---
271
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000272- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
273 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000274
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000275- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
276 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000277
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000278
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000279What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000280=================================
281
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000282*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000283
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000284Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000285--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000286
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000287- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
288
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000289- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
290 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000291 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000292 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000293 a different meaning than before.
294
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000295- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000296 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000297 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000298
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000299- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000300 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000301 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000302
303- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
304 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
305 and deallocation.
306
307- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
308 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
309
310- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
311 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
312 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
313 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
314 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
315
316- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
317 now detected by the garbage collector.
318
319- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
320 [SF bug 519621]
321
322- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
323 identifier.
324
325- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
326 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
327 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
328 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
329 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
330 [SF bug 563060]
331
332- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
333 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
334 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
335 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
336 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
337
338- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
339 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
340 not called. [SF bug #537450]
341
342- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
343
344- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
345 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
346 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
347 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
348 state of the slots would be lost.)
349
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000350Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000351-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000352
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000353- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000354 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
355 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
356 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
357 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000358 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
359 Jython 2.1.
360
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000361- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was inititally developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000362 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000363 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
364 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
365 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
366 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
367 these, see PEP 302.
368
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000369- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
370 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
371 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
372
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000373- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
374 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
375 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
376
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000377- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
378 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
379 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
380
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000381- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
382 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
383 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
384 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
385 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
386 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
387 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
388 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
389 releases or implementations.
390
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000391- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000392 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
393 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000394
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000395- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
396 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
397
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000398- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
399 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
400 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
401
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000402- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
403 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
404
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000405- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
406 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000407 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
408 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000409
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000410- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
411 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
412 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
413 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
414 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
415
416 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
417 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
418 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
419 pattern.
420
421 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
422 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
423 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
424 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
425
426 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
427 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
428 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
429 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
430 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
431 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
432
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000433- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
434 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
435 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
436 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
437 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
438 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
439 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
440 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000441
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000442- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
443 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
444 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
445 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
446 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000447 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
448 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
449 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
450 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
451 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
452 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
453 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000454
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000455- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
456 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
457
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000458- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
459 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
460 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
461 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
462 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
463 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
464 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
465 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
466 to Zack Weinberg!
467
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000468- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
469 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
470 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
471 type. This has been fixed now.
472
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000473- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
474 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
475 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
476
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000477- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
478 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
479 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
480 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
481 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
482 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
483 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
484 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000485 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000486
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000487- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
488 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
489 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000490
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000491- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
492 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
493 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
494 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
495 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
496 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
497 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
498 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000499 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000500 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
501 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
502
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000503- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
504 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
505 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
506 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
507 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
508 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
509 this.)
510
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000511- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
512 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000513 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000514 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000515 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
516 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000517 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
518 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000519
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000520- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
521 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
522 currently running.
523
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000524- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
525 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
526 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
527 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
528
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000529- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
530 as directory names.
531
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000532- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
533 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
534
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000535- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
536 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
537
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000538- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000539 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
540 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000541
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000542- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
543 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
544 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
545 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
546 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
547
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000548- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
549 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
550 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
551 removed.
552
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000553- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
554 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
555 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
556
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000557- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
558 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
559 to __debug__.
560
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000561- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
562 string to the left with zeros. For example,
563 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
564
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000565- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
566 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
567 deprecated now.
568
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000569- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
570 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
571 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000572
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000573- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
574 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
575 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
576 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
577 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000578
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000579- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
580 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
581
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000582- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
583 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
584 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000585 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000586 is backward compatible.
587
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000588- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
589 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
590 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
591 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
592 could access a pointer to freed memory.
593
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000594- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
595 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
596 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
597 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
598 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
599 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000600
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000601- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
602 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
603
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000604- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
605 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
606
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000607- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
608 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
609 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
610 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
611 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
612
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000613- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
614 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
615 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
616
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000617- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000618 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
619
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +0000620- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
621 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
622 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +0000623
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +0000624- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
625 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
626
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +0000627- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
628 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
629 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
630
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +0000631- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
632
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000633Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000634-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000635
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +0000636- Added three operators to the operator module:
637 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
638 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
639 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
640
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +0000641- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
642
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000643- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
644 archives.
645
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +0000646- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
647 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
648 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
649
650 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
651
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000652- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
653 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
654 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +0000655 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000656
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +0000657- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
658 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
659 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
660 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000661 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
662 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
663 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
664 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +0000665
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +0000666- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
667 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +0000668
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +0000669- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
670
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +0000671- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
672 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
673
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +0000674- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
675 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
676 supported.
677
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +0000678- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
679
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +0000680- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
681 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +0000682
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +0000683- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
684 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
685
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000686- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
687
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000688- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
689 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
690
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +0000691- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
692 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
693 functions but callable type objects.
694
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000695- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000696 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000697 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000698
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +0000699- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
700 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +0000701
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +0000702- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
703 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +0000704
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +0000705- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
706 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
707 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
708 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
709
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +0000710- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
711 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +0000712
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +0000713- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
714 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
715 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
716 and __imul__.
717
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +0000718- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +0000719 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
720 is called.
721
Michael W. Hudson34f20ea2002-05-27 15:08:24 +0000722- signal.sigpending, signal.sigprocmask and signal.sigsuspend have
723 been added where available.
724
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +0000725- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
726 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
727 interpreter was compiled.
728
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000729- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
730 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
731 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000732 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000733 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
734 1, not 2.
735
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +0000736- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
737 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
738 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
739 limit.
740
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +0000741- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
742 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
743 bug #623464.
744
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +0000745- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
746 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
747 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
748 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
749
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000750Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000751-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000752
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +0000753- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
754
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +0000755- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
756 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
757 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
758 with Python 2.3a2.
759
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +0000760- os.path exposes getctime.
761
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +0000762- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
763 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparision
764 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
765 the result to zero. Approximate comparision is essential for
766 unit tests of floating point results.
767
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +0000768- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
769 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
770 has been increased.
771
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000772- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
773 executed.
774
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +0000775- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
776 postinstallation script.
777
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +0000778- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
779 test the current module.
780
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +0000781- When cancelling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
782 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
783 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
784 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
785 this behavior needs to be controlled.
786
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000787- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000788 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000789 Ward's Optik package.
790
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000791- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
792 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
793 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
794 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
795
796- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
797 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000798 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000799
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +0000800- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
801 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
802 shelf are binary pickles.
803
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +0000804- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
805 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
806
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +0000807- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
808 modules are iterators now.
809
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +0000810- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
811 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
812 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
813 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
814 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
815 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000816
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +0000817- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
818 with their entity value.
819
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +0000820- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
821
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000822- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
823 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +0000824
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000825- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
826 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000827 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +0000828
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +0000829- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
830 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
831 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
832 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
833 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
834 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
835 main():
836
837 import locale
838 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
839
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +0000840- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
841 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
842
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +0000843- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
844 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
845 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
846 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
847 to the new standard.
848
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +0000849- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
850 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
851 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
852 an extension to the database.
853
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000854- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
855 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
856 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
857 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +0000858 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000859
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000860- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000861 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000862
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000863- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
864 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
865 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
866 bounded integers.
867
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +0000868- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
869 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
870 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
871 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
872 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
873 in existence.
874
875 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
876 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
877 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
878 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
879 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
880 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
881
882 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
883 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
884 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
885 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
886
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +0000887- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
888 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
889 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
890
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +0000891- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
892
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000893- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
894 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
895 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
896 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
897
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +0000898- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
899 argument.
900
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +0000901- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
902 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
903 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
904 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
905 [SF patch 560794].
906
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000907- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
908 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
909 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000910 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
911 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
912 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000913
914- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
915 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +0000916
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +0000917- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
918 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
919 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
920 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +0000921
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +0000922- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
923 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
924 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
925 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
926 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
927
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000928- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +0000929
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +0000930- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
931
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +0000932- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
933 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
934 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
935 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
936 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
937 identical to None.
938
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +0000939- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
940 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
941 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
942 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
943 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
944 results now.
945
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +0000946- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
947 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
948
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000949- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
950 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
951 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
952 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
953 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
954 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
955 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
956 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
957
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +0000958- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
959
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +0000960- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
961 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
962
963- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
964 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
965 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
966 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
967 and other systems.
968
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000969- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
970 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
971 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
972 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 +0000973 work well with these.
974
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +0000975- compileall now supports quiet operation.
976
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000977- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +0000978 connections.
979
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +0000980- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
981 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
982 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
983
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +0000984- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
985 sets
986
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +0000987- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
988 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
989 name.
990
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +0000991- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
992 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
993 passed in.
994
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000995- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +0000996 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +0000997 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
998 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +0000999
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001000- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1001
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001002- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1003
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001004- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1005 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1006 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1007
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001008- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1009 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1010 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1011 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001012 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001013
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001014- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001015 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001016 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001017
1018- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1019 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1020 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1021
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001022- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001023 the value of its expression argument.
1024
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001025- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1026 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1027 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1028
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001029- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1030 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1031 skipstone browser was included.
1032
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001033- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1034 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1035
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001036Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001037-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001038
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001039- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1040 names in addition to accepting file names.
1041
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001042- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1043 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1044 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1045 still used and useful.)
1046
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001047- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1048 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1049 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1050 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001051
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001052- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1053 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1054 the generated binary.
1055
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001056Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001057-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001058
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001059- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1060
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001061- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1062 except in the hands of experts.
1063
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001064- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001065 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1066 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1067 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001068
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001069- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1070 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1071 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1072 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1073 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1074 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1075 builds.
1076
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001077- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1078 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1079 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1080 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1081 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1082 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1083 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1084 new type.
1085
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001086- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001087
1088 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1089 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1090 positive infinities.
1091
1092 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1093 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1094 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1095 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1096 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1097 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1098 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1099
1100 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1101
1102 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1103
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001104- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1105 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1106 size of the executable.
1107
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001108- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1109 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1110 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1111 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001112
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001113- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1114
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001115- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1116 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1117 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001118
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001119- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1120 well as Unix.
1121
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001122- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1123 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1124 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1125 modules in the README file for details.
1126
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001127C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001128-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001129
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001130- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1131 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001132 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001133 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001134 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001135
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001136- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1137 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1138 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1139 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1140 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1141 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
1142 strings are now usually mortal; theres a new API,
1143 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1144 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1145 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1146 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1147 aligned.)
1148
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001149- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1150 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1151 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1152
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001153- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1154 level.
1155
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001156- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1157 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1158 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1159 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1160 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1161
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001162- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1163 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1164 code.
1165
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001166- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1167 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1168 adjusting for negative indices.
1169
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001170- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1171 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1172 object.
1173
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001174- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1175 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1176 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1177
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001178- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1179 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001180
1181- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1182
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001183- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1184 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1185 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1186 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1187
1188- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1189
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001190- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001191
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001192- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001193 without going through the buffer API.
1194
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001195- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001196
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001197- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1198 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1199 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1200 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1201
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001202- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1203 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1204
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001205- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001206 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1207
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001208New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001209-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001210
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001211- OpenVMS is now supported.
1212
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001213- AtheOS is now supported.
1214
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001215- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1216
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001217- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1218
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001219Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001220-----
1221
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001222- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1223 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1224 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001225
1226Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001227-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001228
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001229- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1230 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1231 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1232 bugs.
1233 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001234 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous verion of
1235 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1236 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001237 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001238
1239- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001240 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001241
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001242- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1243 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1244
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001245- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1246 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
1247 MSVC 6, sys.version constains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
1248 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1249
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001250- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1251 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1252 use files" uninstall option).
1253
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001254- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1255
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001256- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1257 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1258
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001259- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1260 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1261 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1262
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001263- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1264 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1265 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1266 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1267 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001268 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1269 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1270 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001271
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001272- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001273 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001274 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1275 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1276 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1277 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1278 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1279 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1280 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1281 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1282 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1283 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1284 work around.
1285
1286- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1287 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1288 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1289 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1290 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1291 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1292 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1293 specified with O_CREAT too).
1294
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001295Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001296----
1297
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001298- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001299
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001300- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1301 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1302 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1303
1304- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1305 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1306 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1307 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1308 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1309 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1310 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1311 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001312
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001313- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1314 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1315 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001316
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001317- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1318 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1319 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1320 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1321 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001322
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001323- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1324 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1325 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001326
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001327- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1328 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001329
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001330- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1331 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1332 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1333 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1334 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001335
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001336- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1337 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1338 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1339
1340- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1341 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1342 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001343
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001344- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1345 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1346 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1347 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
1348 Help Viewer comaptible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001349
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001350- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1351 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001352
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001353- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1354 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001355
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001356- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
1357 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was but "ascii", like on
1358 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1359 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001360
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001361What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001362===============================
1363
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001364*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1365
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001366Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001367--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001368
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001369- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1370 with a custom metaclass.
1371
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001372Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001373-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001374
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001375- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1376 are proxies.
1377
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001378Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001379-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001380
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001381- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1382 very short strings.
1383
1384- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1385 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1386 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1387 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1388 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1389
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001390Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001391-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001392
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001393- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1394 close or delete time).
1395
1396- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1397 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1398
1399- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1400
1401- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001402 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001403
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001404Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001405-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001406
1407Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001408-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001409
1410C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001411-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001412
1413New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001414-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001415
1416Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001417-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001418
1419Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001420-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001421
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001422- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1423
1424- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1425 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1426
1427- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1428 deleted at process exit time.
1429
1430- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1431 in backslash.
1432
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001433Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001434----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001435
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001436- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1437 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1438 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1439
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001440
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001441What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001442===========================
1443
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001444*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1445
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001446Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001447--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001448
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001449- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1450 been extensively updated. See
1451
1452 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1453
1454 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1455
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001456- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1457 deleted!
1458
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001459- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1460 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1461 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1462 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1463 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1464
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001465- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1466
1467 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1468 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1469
1470 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1471 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1472 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1473 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1474 supported anyway.
1475
1476 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1477 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1478
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001479- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1480 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1481 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1482 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1483 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001484
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001485- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1486 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1487 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1488
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001489Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001490-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001491
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001492- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1493 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1494 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1495 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1496 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1497 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001498 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1499 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1500 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1501 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001502
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001503- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1504 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1505 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1506
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001507Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001508-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001509
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001510- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1511
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001512Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001513-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001514
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001515- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1516 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1517 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1518 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1519 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1520 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1521
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001522- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1523
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001524- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1525
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001526- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1527
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001528- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1529 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1530 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1531
1532- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1533
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001534Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001535-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001536
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001537- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1538 off a search on Google.
1539
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001540Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001541-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001542
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001543- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1544 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1545 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1546 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1547 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1548 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1549 other platforms should do likewise.
1550
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001551- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1552 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1553 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1554
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001555C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001556-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001557
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001558- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1559 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1560 producing key-value pairs.
1561
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001562- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001563 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001564 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1565 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1566 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1567 previously went unchallenged.
1568
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001569New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001570-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001571
1572Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001573-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001574
1575Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001576-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001577
1578Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001579----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001580
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001581- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1582 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001583
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001584- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1585 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1586 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1587 home.
1588
1589
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001590What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001591===========================
1592
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001593*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1594
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001595Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001596--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001597
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001598- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1599 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001600
1601 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001602 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001603
1604 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1605 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001606 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001607 This needs to be documented.
1608
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001609- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1610 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1611
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001612- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1613 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1614 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1615
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001616- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1617 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1618
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001619- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1620 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1621 class forbids it).
1622
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001623- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1624 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1625 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1626
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001627- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1628
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001629Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001630-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001631
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001632- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1633 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001634 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001635
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001636- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1637 (like 1 + '').
1638
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001639Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001640-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001641
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001642- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1643 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1644 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1645 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001646 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001647 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1648
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001649- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1650 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1651 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1652 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1653
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001654- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
1655 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001656 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
1657 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
1658 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001659
1660- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
1661 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001662
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00001663- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
1664 bytes on its input.
1665
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001666Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001667-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001668
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001669- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00001670 convenience function.
1671
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001672- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
1673 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
1674 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001675 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
1676 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
1677 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
1678 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
1679 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
1680 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001681
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00001682- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
1683 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
1684 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
1685 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
1686
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00001687- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
1688 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
1689 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
1690
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001691- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
1692 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
1693 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
1694 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
1695
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001696- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
1697 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001698 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001699 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
1700 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
1701 new -l and -e options.
1702
1703- statcache is now deprecated.
1704
1705- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
1706 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001707 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001708 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
1709 time properly taken into account.
1710
1711- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
1712 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
1713 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
1714 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
1715
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001716Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001717-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001718
1719Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001720-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001721
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001722- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
1723 is built with libdb3 if available.
1724
1725- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
1726
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001727C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001728-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001729
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00001730- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
1731 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
1732 PySequence_Size().
1733
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001734- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
1735
1736- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
1737 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
1738 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
1739
1740- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
1741 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
1742
1743- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
1744 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
1745
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001746New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001747-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001748
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001749- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
1750 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
1751
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00001752- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
1753 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
1754
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001755- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
1756
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001757Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001758-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001759
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001760- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
1761 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
1762
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001763Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001764-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001765
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001766Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001767----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001768
1769- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
1770 removed completely in the next release.
1771
1772- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
1773 OSX.
1774
1775- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
1776 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
1777
1778- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
1779
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001780
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001781What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001782===========================
1783
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001784*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
1785
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001786Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001787--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001788
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001789- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001790 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001791 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001792 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
1793 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001794 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
1795 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001796 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
1797 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00001798
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00001799- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
1800 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
1801
1802- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
1803 class methods, static methods, and properties.
1804
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001805Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001806-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001807
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00001808- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
1809 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
1810 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
1811 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
1812 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
1813 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
1814 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
1815 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
1816
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001817- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
1818 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
1819 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
1820 example).
1821
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001822- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001823 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001824 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001825 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001826
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001827- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
1828 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
1829 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00001830 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001831
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001832- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
1833 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
1834 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
1835 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
1836 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
1837 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
1838
1839 isinstance(x, (A, B))
1840
1841 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
1842
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001843Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001844-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001845
1846- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
1847
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001848- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
1849
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001850- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
1851 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00001852
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001853- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
1854 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
1855 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
1856 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
1857 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
1858 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00001859 attributes.
1860
1861- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
1862 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
1863 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00001864
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001865- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
1866 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
1867 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001868
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001869- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
1870 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
1871 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001872 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
1873 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
1874
1875- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
1876 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001877
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001878Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001879-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001880
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00001881- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
1882 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
1883
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001884- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
1885 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
1886 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
1887 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
1888
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00001889- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
1890 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
1891 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
1892 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
1893
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00001894 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
1895 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
1896 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
1897 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
1898 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
1899 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
1900 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
1901 without losing information).
1902
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001903- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00001904 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
1905 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
1906 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
1907 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
1908 module).
1909
1910 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overriden by subclasses.
1911 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
1912 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
1913 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
1914 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001915
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001916- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00001917 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
1918 encoding.
1919
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00001920- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
1921 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
1922
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001923- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001924 to allow saving the message body to a file.
1925
1926- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
1927 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
1928 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
1929 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
1930
1931- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
1932
1933- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
1934 ON, and OFF.
1935
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001936- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
1937 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
1938
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001939Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001940-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001941
1942- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
1943 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
1944 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001945
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001946- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
1947 been added: -X and -E.
1948
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001949Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001950-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001951
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001952- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
1953 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
1954
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001955C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001956-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001957
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00001958- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
1959 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
1960 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
1961 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
1962 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
1963
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00001964- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
1965 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
1966 as long) arguments.
1967
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001968- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
1969 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
1970 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
1971 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
1972 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
1973 report any bugs or strange behavior).
1974
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001975- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
1976 input.
1977
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001978New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001979-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001980
1981Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001982-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001983
1984Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001985-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001986
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00001987- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
1988 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
1989 is created for .py and .pyw files.
1990
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001991- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
1992 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
1993 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001994 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001995
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001996 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
1997 # (SIGINT) behavior.
1998 import signal
1999 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002000
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002001 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002002 while 1:
2003 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002004 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002005 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2006 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2007 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2008 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002009
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002010
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002011What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2012===========================
2013
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002014*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2015
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002016Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002017--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002018
2019- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2020 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2021 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2022
2023- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2024 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2025 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2026 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2027 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2028 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2029 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002030
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002031- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002032 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002033 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2034 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2035 associate a docstring with a property.
2036
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002037- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2038 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2039 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2040 other built-in object types.
2041
2042- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2043 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2044 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2045 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2046 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2047
2048- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2049 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2050
2051- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2052 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002053 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002054 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2055 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2056 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2057 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2058 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2059
2060- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2061 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2062 class.
2063
2064- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2065 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2066 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2067 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2068
2069- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2070 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2071 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2072 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2073
2074- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2075 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2076
2077- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2078 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2079 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2080 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2081 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002082 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002083 with the same value as s.
2084
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002085- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2086
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002087Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002088----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002089
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002090- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2091
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002092- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2093 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2094 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2095 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2096 objects.
2097
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002098- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2099 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002100 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2101 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2102
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002103- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2104 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2105 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2106
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002107Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002108-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002109
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002110- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2111 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2112 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2113 by the instances.
2114
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002115- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2116 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2117 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2118
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002119- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2120 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2121 before the entire comparison is complete.
2122
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002123- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2124 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2125 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2126
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002127- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2128 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2129 getwriter().
2130
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002131- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2132 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2133
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002134- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002135 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2136 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2137
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002138- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2139 iterable object.
2140
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002141- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2142 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002143
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002144- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2145 authentication.
2146
2147- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2148 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002149
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002150- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002151 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2152 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2153 a sample driver.)
2154
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002155Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002156-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002157
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002158- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2159 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2160 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2161 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2162 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2163 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2164 kernel has large file support.
2165
2166- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2167 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2168 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2169 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2170 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2171
2172- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2173 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2174 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2175
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002176C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002177-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002178
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002179- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2180 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2181
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002182New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002183-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002184
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002185- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2186 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2187
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002188Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002189-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002190
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002191- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2192 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2193 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2194 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2195 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2196
2197- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2198 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2199 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2200 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2201
2202- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2203 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2204
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002205Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002206-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002207
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002208- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002209 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2210 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002211
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002212
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002213What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2214===========================
2215
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002216*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2217
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002218Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002219----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002220
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002221- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2222 big to represent as a C double.
2223
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002224- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2225 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2226 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2227 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2228 restriction).
2229
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002230- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2231 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2232 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2233 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2234 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2235
2236 >>> dir([])
2237 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2238 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2239 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2240 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2241 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2242 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2243 'reverse', 'sort']
2244
2245 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2246
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002247- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002248 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2249 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2250 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2251 OverflowError exception.
2252
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002253- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002254 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002255 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2256 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2257 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2258 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2259 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002260 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002261 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2262 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2263
2264 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2265 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2266 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2267 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002268
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002269- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002270 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2271 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2272 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2273 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2274 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2275 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2276 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2277 once it is created.
2278
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002279- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2280 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2281 (key, value) pairs.
2282
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002283- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002284 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2285 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2286
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002287- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2288 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2289 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2290 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2291 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002292
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002293- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002294 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2295 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2296
2297 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2298
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002299- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002300 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2301
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002302Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002303-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002304
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002305- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002306 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2307 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002308
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002309- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2310 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2311 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2312 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2313 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2314 in this area anymore).
2315
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002316- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2317 threading.Timer.
2318
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002319- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2320 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2321
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002322- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002323 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2324
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002325- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002326 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2327 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2328 converted to Python longs.
2329
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002330- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002331 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2332
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002333- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2334 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2335 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2336
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002337Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002338-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002339
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002340- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2341 division operators as per PEP 238.
2342
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002343Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002344-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002345
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002346- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2347 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2348 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2349 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2350
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002351C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002352-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002353
2354- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002355
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002356- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2357 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002358 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002359
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002360 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2361 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002362 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002363 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002364
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002365- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002366 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2367 module:
2368
2369 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002370
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002371 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2372 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002373
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002374 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2375 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002376
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002377 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2378
2379 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2380
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002381- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002382 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2383 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2384 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002385
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002386New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002387-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002388
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002389- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2390 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2391 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2392 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2393 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002394
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002395Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002396-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002397
2398Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002399-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002400
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002401- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2402 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2403 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2404 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002405 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2406 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2407 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2408 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2409 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002410
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002411- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002412 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2413
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002414
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002415What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2416===========================
2417
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002418*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2419
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002420Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002421-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002422
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002423- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2424 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2425
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002426- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2427 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2428 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002429
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002430- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2431 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2432 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2433 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002434
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002435- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2436
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002437- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002438
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002439Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002440-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002441
2442- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002443 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002444 the module docstring for details.
2445
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002446Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002447-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002448
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002449- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002450 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2451 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2452 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002453
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002454- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2455 Nick Mathewson.
2456
2457Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002458----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002459
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002460- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2461 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2462 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2463 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2464 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2465 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2466 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2467 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2468
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002469- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2470 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2471 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2472 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2473
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002474- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2475 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2476 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2477 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2478 come a long way).
2479
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002480- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2481 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2482 write filters for these warnings).
2483
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002484- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2485 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2486 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2487 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2488 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2489
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002490- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2491 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2492 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2493 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2494 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2495 older distribution.
2496
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002497Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002498-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002499
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002500- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2501 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002502 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002503
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002504- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2505 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2506 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2507
2508- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2509
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002510- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2511
2512- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2513
2514- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2515
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002516- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002517
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002518- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2519
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002520New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002521-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002522
2523C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002524-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002525
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002526- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2527 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2528 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2529 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2530 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2531 against buffer overruns.
2532
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002533- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002534 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2535 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002536 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2537 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2538 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2539
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002540- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2541 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2542 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2543 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2544 deprecated.
2545
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002546Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002547-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002548
2549- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2550 relevant is found.
2551
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002552
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002553What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002554===========================
2555
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002556*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2557
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002558Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002559----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002560
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002561- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2562 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2563 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2564 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2565 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2566 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2567 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2568 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002569 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002570 repaired.
2571
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002572- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002573 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002574 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2575 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2576 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2577 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2578 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2579 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2580 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2581 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2582
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002583- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2584 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2585 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2586 leading BMO character).
2587
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002588- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2589 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2590 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2591
2592 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2593 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2594 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002595
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002596 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2597 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2598 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2599 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2600 for various simple to use conversions.
2601
2602 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2603 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2604
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002605 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2606 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2607 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2608 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2609 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2610 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2611 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2612 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2613 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2614 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2615 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2616 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2617 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2618 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2619 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002620
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002621- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2622 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2623 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002624 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002625 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002626
2627 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002628 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2629 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2630 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2631 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2632 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002633 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2634 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002635
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002636 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2637 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2638 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002639 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002640
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002641- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2642 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2643 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2644 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2645 floating arithmetic,
2646
2647 x = 9007199254740992.0
2648 print long(x)
2649
2650 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2651 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2652 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2653 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
2654 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
2655 functions are of good quality).
2656
2657 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
2658 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
2659 algorithms to break.
2660
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00002661- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
2662 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
2663 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
2664 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
2665 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
2666 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
2667 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
2668 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
2669 order.
2670
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002671- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
2672 operation along the most common code paths.
2673
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002674- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
2675 the same as dict.has_key(x).
2676
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00002677- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
2678 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
2679 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
2680 {}.update(UserDict())
2681
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002682- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
2683 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
2684 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
2685 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
2686 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
2687 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
2688 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
2689 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
2690
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002691- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002692 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002693
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002694 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00002695 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
2696 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00002697 join() method of strings
2698 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002699 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
2700 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002701 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00002702 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002703
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00002704- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
2705 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
2706
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002707- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
2708 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
2709
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00002710- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
2711 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
2712 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
2713 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
2714
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002715- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
2716 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002717 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002718 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
2719 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00002720
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00002721- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
2722
2723
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002724Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002725-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002726
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002727- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002728 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002729 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
2730 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
2731
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00002732- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
2733 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
2734
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00002735- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
2736 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
2737 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
2738 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
2739
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00002740- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
2741 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
2742 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
2743
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00002744- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
2745
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00002746- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
2747
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00002748- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
2749 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
2750 that are still imported into string.py).
2751
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002752- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
2753
2754- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
2755 Now it does.
2756
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002757- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
2758
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002759- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
2760 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
2761 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
2762 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
2763 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002764 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
2765 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002766
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00002767- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
2768 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
2769 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
2770 'help(object)'.
2771
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002772Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002773-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002774
2775- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002776 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002777 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
2778 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
2779
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002780- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002781 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
2782 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002783
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002784C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002785-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002786
2787- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
2788 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002789
2790----
2791
2792**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**