blob: 855a95cde2346731d3eb3736353730e5018a8042 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000015- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
16 codes.
17
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000018- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
19 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
20 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
21
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000022- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
23 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
24
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000025- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000026 (fixes bug #1119418).
27
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000028- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
29
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000030- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
31 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
32
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000033- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
34 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
35 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
36
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000037- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
38
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000039- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
40 reference counts in some error exit cases.
41
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000042- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
43 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
44 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
45 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
46 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
47 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
48 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
49 realloc.
50
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000051- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
52 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
53
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000054- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
55 like their int counterparts.
56
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000057- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
58 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
59 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
60 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
61 for a longer write-up of the problem).
62
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000063- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
64 serializing floats.
65
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000066- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
67 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
68 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
69
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000070- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
71 278.
72
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000073- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
74 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
75 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
76 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +000077 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000078 PyNumber_*().
79 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
80
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000081- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
82 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
83 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
84 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
85
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000086- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
87 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
88 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
89 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
90 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
91
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000092- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
93 disabled caused a crash.
94
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000095- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
96 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
97
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000098- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000099 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
100
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000101- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
102
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000103- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000104 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
105 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
106 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000107
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000108- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
109
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000110- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
111 returning None.
112
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000113- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000114 ('\') with a specific error message.
115
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000116- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
117
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000118- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
119 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
120
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000121- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000122 an ferror() call.
123
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000124- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
125 list.sort().
126
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000127- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
128 (2+3) --> (5).
129
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000130- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
131
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000132- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
133 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000134
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000135- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
136 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
137 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
138
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000139- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
140 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
141 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
142
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000143Extension Modules
144-----------------
145
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000146- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
147 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000148
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000149- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
150
151- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000152 line without newlines.
153
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000154- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
155 on Windows.
156
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000157- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
158 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
159
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000160- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
161 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
162 for large or negative values.
163
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000164- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000165 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000166
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000167- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
168
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000169- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
170 if available on the platform.
171
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000172- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
173 available on the platform.
174
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000175- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
176 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
177
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000178- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
179
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000180- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
181 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
182 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
183
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000184- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
185
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000186- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
187 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
188
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000189- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000190 file size.
191
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000192- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
193
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000194- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
195 {remove_history,replace_history}
196
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000197- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
198 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000199
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000200- stat_float_times is now True.
201
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000202- array.array objects are now picklable.
203
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000204- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
205 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
206
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000207- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
208 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
209 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
210
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000211- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
212 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000213
214Library
215-------
216
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000217- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
218
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000219- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
220 functionality.
221
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000222- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
223
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000224- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
225 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
226
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000227- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
228 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
229 match the Content-Length header.
230
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000231- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
232
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000233- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
234 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
235 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
236
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000237- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
238
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000239- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
240
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000241- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
242 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
243
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000244- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
245 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
246 Tkdnd.
247
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000248- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
249 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
250
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000251- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
252 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
253
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000254- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000255 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
256
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000257- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
258 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
259
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000260- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
261 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
262
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000263- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000264 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000265
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000266- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
267
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000268- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
269 error messages.
270
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000271- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
272
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000273- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
274 Bug #1224621.
275
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000276- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
277 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
278 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
279 terminates by raising StopIteration.
280
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000281- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
282
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000283- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
284 component of the path.
285
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000286- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
287 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
288 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
289 class at all.
290
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000291- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
292 files to PyPI.
293
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000294- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
295 them to PyPI.
296
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000297- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
298 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
299 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
300 work as expected.
301
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000302- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
303 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
304
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000305- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000306 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
307
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000308- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
309
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000310- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
311 to build.
312
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000313- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
314 symbolic links on Windows.
315
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000316- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000317 profile.py if available.
318
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000319- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
320
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000321- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
322 in LWPCookieJar.
323
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000324- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
325
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000326- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
327
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000328- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
329
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000330- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
331
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000332- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
333
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000334- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
335
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000336- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
337
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000338- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
339
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000340- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
341 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
342 be exploited in various ways.
343
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000344- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
345
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000346- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
347
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000348- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
349
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000350- Enhancements to the csv module:
351
352 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000353 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000354 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000355 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
356 reporting.
357 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
358 dictates.
359 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000360 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000361 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000362 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
363 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000364 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
365 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000366 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000367 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
368 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
369 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
370 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
371 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
372 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
373 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
374 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
375 without first creating a dialect class.
376 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
377 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
378 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000379 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000380 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
381 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000382 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
383 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
384 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
385 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000386 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
387 This has been fixed.
388
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000389- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
390 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
391 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
392 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
393
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000394- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
395
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000396- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
397 (Bug #951915).
398
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000399- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
400 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
401 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000402 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000403
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000404- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
405
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000406- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
407 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
408
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000409- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
410
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000411- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
412
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000413- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
414
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000415- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
416
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000417- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
418
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000419- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
420 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
421 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
422
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000423- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000424 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000425
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000426- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
427 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
428 tokenizer with very long source lines.
429
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000430- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
431 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
432
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000433- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
434 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000435
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000436- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
437 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
438
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000439- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
440 correctly.
441
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000442- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
443 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
444 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
445 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
446 between two lines.
447
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000448- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
449 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
450 handlers.
451
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000452- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000453 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
454 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000455
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000456- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
457 considering it exactly like a '*'.
458
459
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000460Build
461-----
462
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000463- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
464 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
465
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000466- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
467 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
468
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000469- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
470 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
471 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000472 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000473
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000474- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
475 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
476 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
477
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000478- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
479
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000480- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
481 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
482
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000483- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
484 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
485 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
486 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
487 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
488 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
489 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
490 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
491
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000492- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
493 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
494 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
495 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
496
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000497
498C API
499-----
500
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000501- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
502
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000503- Removed PyRange_New().
504
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000505
506Tests
507-----
508
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000509- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000510
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000511
512Documentation
513-------------
514
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000515- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
516
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000517- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
518
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000519- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
520
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000521- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
522
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000523- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
524
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000525- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
526
527- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
528
529- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
530
531- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
532
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000533- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
534 Closes bug #1166582.
535
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000536- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
537 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
538 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
539
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000540Mac
541---
542
543
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000544New platforms
545-------------
546
547- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
548
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000549
550Tools/Demos
551-----------
552
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000553- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
554 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
555 source files that need an encoding declaration.
556 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
557
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000558- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
559
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000560- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000561
562
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000563What's New in Python 2.4 final?
564===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000565
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000566*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000567
568Core and builtins
569-----------------
570
571- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
572 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
573 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
574
575
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000576What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
577==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000578
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000579*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000580
581Core and builtins
582-----------------
583
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000584- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
585 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
586 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
587
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000588
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000589Library
590-------
591
592- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
593 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
594 raised is re-raised.
595
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000596- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
597 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
598
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000599- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
600 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
601 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
602 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
603 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
604 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
605 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
606 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
607 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
608 by the slice are recomputed now.
609
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000610- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000611
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000612Build
613-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000614
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000615- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
616 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
617 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000618
619C API
620-----
621
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000622- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
623
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000624
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000625What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
626================================
627
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000628*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000629
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000630License
631-------
632
633The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
634is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
635changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
636Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
637intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
638durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
639the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
640License::
641
642 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
643
644says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
645to Python 2.1.1.
646
647The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
648License Version 2.
649
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000650Core and builtins
651-----------------
652
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000653- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
654 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
655 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
656 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
657 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
658 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
659 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
660 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
661 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
662 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
663
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000664- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000665
666Extension Modules
667-----------------
668
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000669- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
670 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
671 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
672 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000673
674Library
675-------
676
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000677- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
678 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
679 returned.
680
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000681- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
682
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000683- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
684 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
685
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000686- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
687
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000688- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
689 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000690
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000691- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
692
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000693- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
694
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000695- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000696 the source code is updated and reloaded.
697
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000698Build
699-----
700
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000701- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000702
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000703What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
704================================
705
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000706*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000707
708Core and builtins
709-----------------
710
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000711- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000712 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
713
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000714- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
715 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
716 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
717 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
718
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000719- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
720 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
721
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000722- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
723 constant.
724
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000725- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
726 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
727 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
728 large), and to anomalies such as
729 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
730 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
731 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
732 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000733
734Extension modules
735-----------------
736
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000737- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
738 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000739 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
740 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
741 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000742
743Library
744-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000745
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000746- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000747 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000748 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
749 --swig-cpp.
750
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000751- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
752 it is set.
753
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000754- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000755
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000756- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
757 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
758 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
759 Closes bug #1039270.
760
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000761- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000762
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000763 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000764 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
765 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
766 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
767 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
768 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
769 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
770 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
771 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
772 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
773 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
774 + Updates to documentation.
775
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000776- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
777 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
778 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
779 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
780
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000781- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000782
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000783- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
784 applications should use the getmember function.
785
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000786- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
787
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000788- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
789 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
790 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
791 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
792 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
793 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
794 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
795 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
796 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
797
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000798- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
799 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000800 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000801
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000802- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
803 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
804 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
805 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
806 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
807 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
808 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
809 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000810
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000811- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
812 the new public features (of which there are many).
813
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000814- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000815 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
816 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
817 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
818 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000819 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000820
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000821- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
822
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000823- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
824 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
825 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
826 options.
827
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000828- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
829 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
830 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
831 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
832 conditions under which non-string values work.
833
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000834Build
835-----
836
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000837- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
838 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
839 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
840
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000841- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
842 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
843 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
844 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
845 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000846
847C API
848-----
849
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000850- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
851 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
852
853- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
854
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000855- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
856 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
857 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
858 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
859 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
860 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
861 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
862 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
863 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
864
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000865- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
866
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000867- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
868 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
869 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000870
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000871Tests
872-----
873
874- test__locale ported to unittest
875
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000876Mac
877---
878
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000879- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
880 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
881 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000882
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000883Tools/Demos
884-----------
885
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000886- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
887 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
888 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
889 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
890 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000891
892
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000893What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
894=================================
895
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000896*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000897
898Core and builtins
899-----------------
900
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000901- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000902 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
903
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000904- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
905 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
906 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
907 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
908 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
909 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
910 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
911 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000912 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
913 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
914 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
915 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
916 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000917
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000918- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
919 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
920 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
921 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
922 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
923
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000924- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
925
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000926- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
927 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
928
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000929- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
930 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
931 modified the list.
932
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000933- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
934 functions is now writable.
935
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000936- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
937 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
938 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
939 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
940
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000941- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
942 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
943 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
944 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
945 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000946
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000947- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
948 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
949
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000950Extension modules
951-----------------
952
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000953- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
954
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000955- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
956 data.
957
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000958- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
959 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
960 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
961 supposed to have been truncated away.
962
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000963- Added socket.socketpair().
964
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000965- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
966 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
967
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000968- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000969 versions of Python, have now been removed.
970
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000971Library
972-------
973
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000974- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000975 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000976
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000977- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
978 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
979
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000980- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
981 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
982
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000983- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
984
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000985- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
986 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000987
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000988- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
989 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
990
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000991- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
992
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000993- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
994
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000995- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
996
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000997- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
998 Percivall.
999
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001000- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1001 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1002
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001003- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1004 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1005 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001006 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001007
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001008- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1009 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1010 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1011 and exponent.
1012
1013- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1014
1015- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001016 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001017 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1018
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001019- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1020 to the readline module.
1021
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001022- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001023 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1024 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001025
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001026- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1027 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1028 contains symlinks.
1029
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001030- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1031 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1032
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001033- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1034 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1035 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1036
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001037- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1038 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1039 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1040 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1041 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1042 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1043 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1044 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1045 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1046 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1047 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1048 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1049 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1050
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001051- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1052
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001053Tools/Demos
1054-----------
1055
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001056- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1057 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1058
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001059- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1060
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001061Build
1062-----
1063
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001064- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1065 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1066 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1067 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1068 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1069 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1070 plans to do so.
1071
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001072- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1073 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1074
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001075- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1076 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1077
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001078- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1079 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1080
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001081- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1082 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1083
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001084- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1085 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1086
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001087C API
1088-----
1089
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001090..
1091
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001092Documentation
1093-------------
1094
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001095- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1096 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1097
1098- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1099 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1100 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001101
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001102New platforms
1103-------------
1104
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001105- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1106
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001107Tests
1108-----
1109
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001110..
1111
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001112Windows
1113-------
1114
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001115- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1116 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1117 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1118 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1119 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1120 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1121 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1122 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1123 the problem.
1124
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001125Mac
1126---
1127
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001128..
1129
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001130
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001131What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1132=================================
1133
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001134*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001135
1136Core and builtins
1137-----------------
1138
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001139- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1140 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1141 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1142 sensitive code.
1143
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001144- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001145 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001146
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001147 @staticmethod
1148 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001149
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001150 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001151
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001152- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1153 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1154 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1155 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1156 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1157 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1158 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1159 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1160 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1161 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1162 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1163
1164 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1165 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1166 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1167 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1168 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1169 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1170 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1171
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001172- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1173 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1174
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001175- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001176 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001177
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001178- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001179 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001180 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1181
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001182- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001183 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1184 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1185
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001186- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1187 types that support garbage collection.
1188
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001189- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1190
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001191- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1192 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1193 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1194 Jython.
1195
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001196- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1197
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001198- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1199 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1200
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001201- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1202 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1203 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001204
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001205- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1206 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1207 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1208
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001209Extension modules
1210-----------------
1211
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001212- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1213
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001214Library
1215-------
1216
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001217- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1218 TIS-620
1219
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001220- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1221 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1222 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1223 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1224 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1225 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1226 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1227 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1228 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1229 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1230
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001231- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1232
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001233- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1234 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1235 same as when the argument is omitted).
1236 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1237
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001238- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1239
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001240- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1241 schemes are offered.
1242
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001243- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1244
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001245- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1246 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1247 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1248
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001249- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1250
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001251- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1252 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1253
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001254- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1255 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1256 when dummy_threading is being used.
1257
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001258- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1259 from a tarfile.
1260
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001261- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001262 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001263
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001264- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1265 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1266 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1267 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1268
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001269- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1270 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1271
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001272- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1273 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1274 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1275 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1276 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1277 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1278 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1279 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1280 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1281 by some other method in progress).
1282
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001283- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1284 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1285 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001286
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001287- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1288
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001289- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1290 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1291 AM Kuchling.
1292
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001293- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1294 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1295 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1296
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001297- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1298 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1299 instead of unsigned.
1300
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001301- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001302 no longer part of the public API.
1303
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001304- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1305 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1306 string methods of the same name).
1307
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001308- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001309 SF patch 945642.
1310
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001311- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1312
1313 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1314
1315 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1316 DocTestSuites.
1317
1318- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1319 that provide thread-local data.
1320
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001321- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1322 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1323
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001324- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1325
1326- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1327 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1328 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1329
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001330- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1331
1332 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1333 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1334 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001335
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001336 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1337 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1338 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1339 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1340
1341 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1342 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1343
1344 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1345 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1346 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1347 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1348
1349 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1350 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1351 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1352 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1353 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1354
1355 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1356 wrapping help output.
1357
1358 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1359 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1360 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001361
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001362C API
1363-----
1364
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001365- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1366 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1367 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1368 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1369 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1370 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1371 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1372 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1373 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1374 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1375 its visible semantics have not changed.
1376
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001377- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1378 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1379
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001380Documentation
1381-------------
1382
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001383- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001384
1385 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001386 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001387
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001388 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001389
1390 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1391
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001392- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001393
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001394Tests
1395-----
1396
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001397- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001398 platforms that use the Makefile.
1399
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001400- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1401 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1402 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1403
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001404
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001405What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1406=================================
1407
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001408*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001409
1410Core and builtins
1411-----------------
1412
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001413- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1414 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1415 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1416 objects now (one object instead of three).
1417
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001418- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1419 Windows DLLs.
1420
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001421- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1422 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001423
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001424- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1425 a new .pyc magic.
1426
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001427- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1428 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1429 be there.
1430
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001431- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1432 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1433 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1434
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001435- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1436 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1437 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1438
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001439- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1440
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001441- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1442 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1443 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001444
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001445- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1446 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1447
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001448- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1449
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001450- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001451 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001452
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001453- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1454
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001455- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1456
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001457- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1458 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1459
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001460- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1461 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1462 Fixes bug #858016 .
1463
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001464- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1465 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1466 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1467
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001468- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1469 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1470 improves their performance (about 35%).
1471
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001472- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1473 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1474 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1475
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001476- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1477 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1478 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1479 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1480
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001481- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1482 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001483 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001484 length is not known).
1485
1486- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1487 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001488 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1489 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001490 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1491
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001492- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1493 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1494
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001495- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1496 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1497 keyword arguments.
1498
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001499- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1500 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1501 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1502
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001503- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1504 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1505 cases.
1506
1507- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1508 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1509 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1510 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1511 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1512 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1513 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1514 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1515 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1516 a release build.
1517
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001518- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1519 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1520
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001521- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001522 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001523
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001524- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1525 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1526 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1527 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1528 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1529 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1530 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1531 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1532 destroyed.
1533
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001534- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1535 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1536 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1537 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1538 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1539 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1540 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1541 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1542
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001543- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1544 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1545 character other than a space.
1546
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001547- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1548 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1549 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1550 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1551 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1552 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1553 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1554 attributes with the same name.
1555
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001556- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1557 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1558 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1559 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1560 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1561 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1562 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1563 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1564 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1565 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1566 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1567 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1568 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1569 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001570
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001571- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1572 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1573 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1574 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1575 This has been repaired.
1576
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001577- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1578
1579- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1580
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001581- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1582 over a sequence.
1583
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001584- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001585 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001586
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001587- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1588
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001589- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1590 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1591 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1592 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1593 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1594 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1595 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1596 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1597
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001598- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1599 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1600 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1601
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001602- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1603 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1604 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1605 freelist.
1606
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001607- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1608 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1609
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001610- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1611 number.
1612
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001613- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1614 a TypeError exception.
1615
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001616- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1617 820195.
1618
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001619- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1620 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1621 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1622
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001623- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001624 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1625 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001626
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001627- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1628 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1629 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1630
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001631- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1632 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001633 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001634
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001635- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001636 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1637 the first call.
1638
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001639
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001640Extension modules
1641-----------------
1642
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001643- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1644 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1645
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001646- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1647 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1648 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1649 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1650 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1651 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1652 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001653
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001654- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1655
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001656- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1657
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001658- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1659 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1660
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001661- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1662 fewer false positives.
1663
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001664- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1665 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1666
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001667- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001668 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1669
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001670- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001671 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001672 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001673 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1674 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001675
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001676- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1677 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1678 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1679 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1680
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001681- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1682 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1683 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1684 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1685 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1686 #897625.
1687
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001688- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1689 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1690
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001691- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1692 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1693 and pops on either side of the deque.
1694
1695- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1696 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1697
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001698- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1699 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1700 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1701 other functions that expect a function argument.
1702
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001703- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1704
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001705- os.getsid was added.
1706
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001707- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1708 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1709 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1710
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001711- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1712
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001713- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1714
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001715- readline.clear_history was added.
1716
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001717- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1718
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001719- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1720
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001721- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1722
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001723- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1724
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001725- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1726
1727- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1728
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001729- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1730
1731- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1732
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001733- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1734 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1735 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1736
1737- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1738 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1739 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1740 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1741 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1742 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1743 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1744
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001745- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1746 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1747 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1748 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001749
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001750- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001751 iterators from a single iterable.
1752
1753- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1754 of raising a TypeError exception.
1755
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001756- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1757 as parameter.
1758
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001759Library
1760-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001761
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001762- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1763
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001764- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1765 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1766 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001767
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001768- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1769 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1770 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001771
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001772- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001773
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001774- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1775 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001776
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001777- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1778 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1779
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001780- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1781
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001782- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001783 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001784
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001785- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001786 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001787
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001788- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1789
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001790- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1791 on cygwin and mingw32.
1792
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001793- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1794
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001795- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1796 module.
1797
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001798- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1799 installation scheme for all platforms.
1800
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001801- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001802 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001803
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001804- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1805 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1806 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1807
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001808- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1809 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1810 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1811
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001812- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1813
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001814- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1815
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001816- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1817 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1818
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001819- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1820 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1821 type pattern with the same value exists.
1822
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001823- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1824 when run from the command prompt).
1825
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001826- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1827 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1828
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001829- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1830 default sort).
1831
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001832- Added global runctx function to profile module
1833
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001834- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1835
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001836- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1837
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001838- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1839
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001840- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001841 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1842 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1843 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1844 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1845 accordingly.
1846
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001847- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1848 decoding standards.
1849
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001850- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1851 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1852 called for all requests.
1853
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001854- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1855 they are passed to the compiler.
1856
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001857- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1858 indent, width and depth.
1859
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001860- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1861 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1862
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001863- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1864 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1865
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001866- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1867
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001868- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1869
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001870- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1871
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001872- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1873 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1874
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001875- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001876 for better performance.
1877
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001878- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001879
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001880- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1881 a string).
1882
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001883- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1884
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001885- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1886
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001887- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1888
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001889- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1890
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001891- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1892 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1893 list of fieldnames.
1894
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001895- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1896 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1897
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001898- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1899
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001900- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1901 empty lists.
1902
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001903- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1904 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1905 and shelves.
1906
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001907- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1908 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1909
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001910- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001911 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1912 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001913
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001914- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1915 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001916 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001917
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001918- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001919 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1920 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1921
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001922- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1923 and removed in Py2.4.
1924
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001925- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1926
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001927- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1928
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001929Tools/Demos
1930-----------
1931
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001932- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1933 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1934
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001935- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1936
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001937- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1938 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1939 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1940 destination in situations where both files are given.
1941
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001942- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1943 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1944 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1945 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1946
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001947- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1948
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001949- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1950 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1951 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1952 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1953 now.
1954
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001955- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1956 in effect
1957
1958- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1959 C-c C-h
1960
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001961- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1962 -d option was given.
1963
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001964Build
1965-----
1966
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001967- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1968 build under OS X.
1969
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001970- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1971 --enable-profiling.
1972
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001973- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1974 is configured --with-tsc.
1975
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001976- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1977 on AMD64.
1978
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001979- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1980 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1981
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001982- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1983 removed.
1984
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001985- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1986 supported (see PEP 11).
1987
1988- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1989
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001990- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1991
1992- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1993 (see PEP 11).
1994
1995- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1996 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1997
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001998C API
1999-----
2000
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002001- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2002 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2003 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2004
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002005- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2006 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2007 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2008 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2009
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002010- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2011 generator objects.
2012
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002013- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2014 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002015 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2016 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002017
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002018- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2019 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2020
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002021- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2022 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2023 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2024 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2025 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2026
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002027- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2028 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2029 about 10% faster.
2030
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002031- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2032 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2033
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002034- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2035 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2036 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2037 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2038
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002039Windows
2040-------
2041
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002042- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2043 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2044 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2045 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2046
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002047- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2048 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2049 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2050
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002051
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002052What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2053===============================
2054
2055*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2056
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002057IDLE
2058----
2059
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002060- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2061 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2062 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2063 context-menu actions.
2064
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002065- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2066 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2067 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2068 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2069 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2070 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2071 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2072 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2073 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2074
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002075
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002076What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2077=============================================
2078
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002079*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002080
2081Core and builtins
2082-----------------
2083
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002084- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002085 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002086 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2087
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002088Extension modules
2089-----------------
2090
2091- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2092 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2093 than once. This has been fixed.
2094
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002095- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2096 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2097 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2098 call.
2099
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002100- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2101
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002102Library
2103-------
2104
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002105- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2106 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2107
2108- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2109 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2110 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2111 restored.
2112
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002113IDLE
2114----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002115
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002116- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002117
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002118Build
2119-----
2120
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002121- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2122 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2123
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002124C API
2125-----
2126
2127Windows
2128-------
2129
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002130- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2131 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2132
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002133- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2134
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002135Mac
2136---
2137
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002138- Various fixes to pimp.
2139
2140- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2141
2142- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2143 more problems than it solves.
2144
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002145
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002146What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2147=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002148
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002149*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2150
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002151Core and builtins
2152-----------------
2153
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002154- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2155 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2156
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002157- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2158 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002159 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002160
2161- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2162 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2163 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002164 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002165
2166- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2167 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002168
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002169- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2170 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2171 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2172
2173- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002174 770247.
2175
2176- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002177
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002178Extension modules
2179-----------------
2180
2181- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2182 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2183
2184- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2185
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002186- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2187
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002188- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2189 contained within the _strptime module.
2190
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002191- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2192 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2193
2194- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002195 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2196
2197- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2198 the find_class attribute, if present.
2199
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002200- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002201
2202 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2203 (SF bug 763298).
2204
2205 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002206 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2207 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2208 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002209
2210 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2211
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002212Library
2213-------
2214
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002215- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2216
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002217- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2218 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2219 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2220 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2221 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2222 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2223 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2224 or Tester().
2225
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002226- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2227 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2228 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2229 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2230 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2231 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2232 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2233 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2234 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002235
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002236 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002237
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002238- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2239 weren't before was an oversight.
2240
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002241- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2242 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2243
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002244- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2245 when there are no lines.
2246
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002247- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2248 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2249
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002250- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2251 to child processes.
2252
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002253- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2254
2255- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2256
2257- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2258 xmlrpclib.
2259
2260- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2261 responses.
2262
2263- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2264 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2265
2266- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2267 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2268 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2269
2270- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2271 used as patterns.
2272
2273- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2274 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2275 than Tk 8.3.
2276
2277- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2278
2279- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002280
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002281Tools/Demos
2282-----------
2283
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002284- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2285
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002286- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2287
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002288- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002289
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002290Build
2291-----
2292
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002293- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2294
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002295- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2296
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002297- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2298 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002299
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002300- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2301 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2302 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002303
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002304C API
2305-----
2306
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002307- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2308 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2309
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002310Windows
2311-------
2312
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002313- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2314 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2315 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2316 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2317 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2318 Python exception ::
2319
2320 thread.error: can't start new thread
2321
2322 is raised now.
2323
2324- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2325 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2326 instead of from DLL teardown.
2327
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002328Mac
2329---
2330
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002331- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002332 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002333 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2334 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2335 the executable in the bundle.
2336
2337- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002338
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002339- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2340
2341- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2342 on Panther.
2343
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002344What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2345================================
2346
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002347*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002348
2349Core and builtins
2350-----------------
2351
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002352- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2353 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2354 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2355 with the -i option.
2356
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002357- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2358 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2359
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002360- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2361 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2362
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002363- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2364 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2365 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2366 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2367 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2368 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2369 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2370 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2371 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2372 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2373 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2374 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2375 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002376
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002377- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2378 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2379 embedded in a lambda expression.
2380
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002381- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2382 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2383 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2384 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2385 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2386
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002387- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2388 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2389 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2390
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002391- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2392 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2393
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002394- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2395 It's writable again.
2396
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002397- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2398 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2399 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002400 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002401
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002402- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2403 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2404 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2405
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002406Extension modules
2407-----------------
2408
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002409- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2410 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2411
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002412- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2413 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2414 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2415 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2416
2417- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2418 collection.
2419
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002420- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2421 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2422 unique within a single program run.
2423
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002424- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2425 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2426
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002427- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2428 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2429
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002430- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2431 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002432
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002433- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2434
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002435- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2436 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2437
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002438- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2439 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2440 for many BSD-derived systems.
2441
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002442
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002443Library
2444-------
2445
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002446- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2447 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2448 primary ones:
2449
2450 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2451 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2452 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2453
2454 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2455 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2456 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2457 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2458 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2459 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2460
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002461- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2462 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2463 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2464 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2465 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2466 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2467 argument.
2468
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002469- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2470 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2471 in the archive.
2472
2473- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2474 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2475
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002476- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2477 569574).
2478
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002479- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2480 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2481 no more.
2482
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002483- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2484 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2485 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2486 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2487 code coverage.
2488
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002489- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2490 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2491 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002492 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2493 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002494
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002495- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2496 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2497 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002498 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002499
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002500- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2501
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002502- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2503 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2504 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2505 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2506
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002507- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2508 handling.
2509
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002510- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2511 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2512
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002513- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2514 in socket.py.
2515
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002516- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2517
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002518- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2519 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2520 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2521 opener with proxy support.
2522
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002523- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2524
2525- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2526
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002527Tools/Demos
2528-----------
2529
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002530- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2531
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002532- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2533
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002534- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2535 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002536
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002537- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2538 files.
2539
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002540Build
2541-----
2542
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002543- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002544 different root directory.
2545
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002546C API
2547-----
2548
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002549- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2550 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2551 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2552 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2553 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2554 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2555 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2556 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2557 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2558 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2559
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002560- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2561 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2562 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2563 from Python.
2564
2565
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002566New platforms
2567-------------
2568
2569None this time.
2570
2571Tests
2572-----
2573
2574- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2575 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2576
2577Windows
2578-------
2579
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002580- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2581
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002582- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2583 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2584 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2585 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2586 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2587 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2588 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2589 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2590 that's what it's for.
2591
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002592Mac
2593---
2594
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002595- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2596 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2597 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2598 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002599- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2600 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2601- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002602
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002603SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2604------------------------------------
2605
2606430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2607598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2608622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2609661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2610683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2611697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2612713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2613724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2614727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2615729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2616730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2617731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2618732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2619733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2620735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2621740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2622744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2623745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2624747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2625749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2626751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2627753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2628755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2629757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2630760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2631
2632
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002633What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2634================================
2635
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002636*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002637
2638Core and builtins
2639-----------------
2640
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002641- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2642 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2643
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002644- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2645 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2646 and cannot be strings).
2647
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002648- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2649 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2650 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2651 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2652
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002653- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2654 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2655 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2656 Python itself.
2657
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002658- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2659 the referenced object, if it has one.
2660
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002661- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2662 the thread started at
2663 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2664
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002665- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2666 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2667 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2668 placed on a list index.
2669
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002670- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2671 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2672 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2673 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2674
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002675- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2676 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2677 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2678 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2679 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2680 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2681 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2682
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002683- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2684 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2685 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2686 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2687 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2688
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002689- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2690 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002691
2692- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2693 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2694 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2695 #693195.)
2696
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002697- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2698 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002699
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002700- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002701 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002702 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2703 interpreter executions, would fail.
2704
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002705- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002706 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002707 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002708
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002709Extension modules
2710-----------------
2711
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002712- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2713 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2714 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2715 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2716
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002717- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2718 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2719
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002720- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2721 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2722 and Greg Chapman.)
2723
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002724- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2725 recursively.
2726
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002727- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002728 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2729 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2730 leaks.
2731
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002732- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2733
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002734- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2735 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2736 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2737 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2738 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2739 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2740 #705836.
2741
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002742- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002743 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2744
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002745- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2746 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2747 See SF bug #692416.
2748
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002749- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2750 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2751
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002752- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2753 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2754 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002755
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002756- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002757 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2758 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2759
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002760- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2761 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2762 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2763 timeouts to work properly.
2764
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002765Library
2766-------
2767
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002768- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2769 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2770 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2771 future release.
2772
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002773- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2774 for querying platform dependent features.
2775
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002776- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002777
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002778- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2779 pickle protocol versions.
2780
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002781- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2782 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2783 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2784
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002785- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2786
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002787- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2788 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2789 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2790 modules.
2791
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002792- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2793 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2794 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2795
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002796- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2797 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2798
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002799- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2800 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2801 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2802
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002803- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002804 MS Office extensions.
2805
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002806- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2807 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2808
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002809- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2810 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2811
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002812- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2813 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2814 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2815 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2816 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2817 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2818
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002819- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2820 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2821 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002822
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002823- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2824 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2825 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2826
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002827- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2828
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002829- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2830 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2831 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2832
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002833Tools/Demos
2834-----------
2835
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002836- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2837 See the module docstring for details.
2838
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002839Build
2840-----
2841
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002842- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2843 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002844
2845C API
2846-----
2847
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002848- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2849
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002850- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2851 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2852 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2853
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002854- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2855 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002856
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002857 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2858 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2859 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002860
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002861- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002862 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2863
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002864- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2865 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2866 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002867
2868New platforms
2869-------------
2870
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002871None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002872
2873Tests
2874-----
2875
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002876- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2877 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002878
2879Windows
2880-------
2881
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002882- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2883 function.
2884
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002885- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2886 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002887
2888Mac
2889---
2890
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002891- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2892 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002893
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002894- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2895 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002896
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002897- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2898 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2899 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002900
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002901- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002902 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2903 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002904
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002905- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2906 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002907
2908
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002909What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2910=================================
2911
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002912*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002913
2914Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002915-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002916
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002917- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2918 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2919 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2920
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002921- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2922 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2923 (SF patch #664376.)
2924
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002925- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2926 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2927 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2928 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2929 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2930 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002931 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002932
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002933- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2934 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2935 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2936 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002937 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002938
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002939- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2940 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2941 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2942 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2943 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2944 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2945 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2946 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2947 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2948 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2949 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2950
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002951- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2952 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2953 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2954 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2955 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2956 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2957
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002958- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2959 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2960
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002961- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2962 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2963 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2964 case.)
2965
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002966- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2967 passed as unicode strings.
2968
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002969- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2970 See SF bug #683467.
2971
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002972- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2973 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2974
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002975- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2976
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002977- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2978
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002979- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2980 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2981 arguments.
2982
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002983- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2984 See SF bug #667147.
2985
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002986- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002987 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002988 See SF bug #676155.
2989
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002990- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002991 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002992 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2993 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2994 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2995 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2996 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2997 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002998
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002999Extension modules
3000-----------------
3001
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003002- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3003 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3004 tp_as_number pointer.
3005
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003006- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3007 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3008 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3009 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3010 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3011
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003012- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3013
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003014- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3015
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003016- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003017 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003018 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3019 patch #678531.)
3020
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003021- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3022 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3023
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003024- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3025 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3026
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003027- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3028
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003029- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3030 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3031 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3032
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003033- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3034
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003035- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3036 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3037
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003038- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003039
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003040- datetime changes:
3041
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003042 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3043
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003044 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3045 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3046 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3047 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3048 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3049 now.
3050
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003051 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003052 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3053 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003054
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003055 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003056 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003057 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3058 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3059 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3060 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003061
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003062 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3063 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3064 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003065 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3066
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003067 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3068 by a later example coded by Guido.
3069
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003070 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003071 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3072 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3073 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003074 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3075 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3076
3077 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3078 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3079 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3080 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3081 tzinfo subclass instance.
3082
3083 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3084 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3085 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3086 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3087 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3088 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3089 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3090 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003091
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003092 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3093 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3094 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3095 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3096 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003097 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3098
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003099 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003100
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003101 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3102 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3103 as a naive datetime object.
3104
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003105 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3106 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3107 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3108
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003109 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3110 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3111 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3112 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3113 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3114 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3115 comparison.
3116
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003117 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3118 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3119 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3120 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003121 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003122
3123 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003124
3125 and ::
3126
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003127 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3128
3129 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3130 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3131 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3132 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3133
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003134 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3135 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3136 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3137 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3138 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3139
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003140 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3141 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003142 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3143 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003144
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003145Library
3146-------
3147
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003148- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3149 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3150
3151- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3152 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3153 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3154 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3155 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3156 See PEP 307 for details.
3157
3158- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3159 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3160
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003161- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3162 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003163 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003164 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3165 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003166 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003167
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003168- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3169 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3170
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003171- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3172 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3173 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3174
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003175- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3176
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003177- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3178 exception.
3179
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003180- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3181 class.
3182
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003183- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3184 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3185 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3186
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003187- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3188 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3189
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003190- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003191 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3192 See SF bug #659228.
3193
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003194- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3195 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3196 See SF patch #651082.
3197
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003198- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003199
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003200- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3201 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3202
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003203- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003204 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003205
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003206- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3207 DOS paths from other platforms.
3208
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003209Tools/Demos
3210-----------
3211
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003212- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3213 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3214 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3215 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3216 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3217 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3218 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3219 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3220 example:
3221
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003222 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3223 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003224
3225 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3226
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003227
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003228Build
3229-----
3230
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003231- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3232 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3233 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003234 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3235
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003236 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3237
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003238- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3239 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3240 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3241 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3242 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3243 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3244 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3245 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3246 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3247
3248- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3249 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3250 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3251 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3252
3253- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3254 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3255
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003256C API
3257-----
3258
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003259- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3260 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003261
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003262- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3263 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3264 tp_as_number pointer.
3265
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003266- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3267 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3268 (SF #681367)
3269
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003270- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3271 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3272 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3273 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003274
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003275Tests
3276-----
3277
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003278- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003279 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3280 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3281 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3282 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3283 pydoc.)
3284
3285- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3286
3287- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003288
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003289Windows
3290-------
3291
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003292- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3293 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3294 time).
3295
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003296- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3297 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3298
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003299- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3300 release without strong cryptography.
3301
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003302- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003303 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003304
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003305- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3306 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3307
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003308Mac
3309---
3310
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003311- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3312 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003313
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003314- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3315 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3316 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003317
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003318- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3319 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003320
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003321- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3322 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3323 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3324 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003325
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003326- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003327 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3328 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3329 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003330
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003331
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003332What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003333=================================
3334
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003335*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003336
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003337Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003338--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003339
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003340- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3341
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003342- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3343 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003344 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003345 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003346 a different meaning than before.
3347
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003348- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003349 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003350 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003351
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003352- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003353 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003354 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003355
3356- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3357 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3358 and deallocation.
3359
3360- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3361 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3362
3363- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3364 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3365 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3366 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3367 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3368
3369- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3370 now detected by the garbage collector.
3371
3372- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3373 [SF bug 519621]
3374
3375- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3376 identifier.
3377
3378- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3379 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3380 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3381 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3382 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3383 [SF bug 563060]
3384
3385- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3386 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3387 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3388 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3389 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3390
3391- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3392 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3393 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3394
3395- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3396
3397- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3398 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3399 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3400 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3401 state of the slots would be lost.)
3402
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003403Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003404-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003405
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003406- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003407 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3408 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3409 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3410 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003411 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3412 Jython 2.1.
3413
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003414- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003415 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003416 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3417 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3418 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3419 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3420 these, see PEP 302.
3421
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003422- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3423 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3424 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3425
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003426- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3427 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3428 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3429
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003430- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3431 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3432 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3433
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003434- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3435 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3436 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3437 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3438 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3439 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3440 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3441 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3442 releases or implementations.
3443
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003444- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003445 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3446 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003447
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003448- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3449 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3450
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003451- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3452 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3453 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3454
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003455- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3456 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3457
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003458- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3459 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003460 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3461 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003462
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003463- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3464 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3465 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3466 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3467 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3468
3469 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3470 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3471 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3472 pattern.
3473
3474 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3475 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3476 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3477 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3478
3479 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3480 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3481 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3482 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3483 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3484 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3485
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003486- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3487 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3488 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3489 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3490 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3491 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3492 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3493 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003494
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003495- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3496 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3497 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3498 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3499 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003500 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3501 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3502 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3503 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3504 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3505 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3506 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003507
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003508- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3509 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3510
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003511- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3512 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3513 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3514 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3515 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3516 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3517 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3518 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3519 to Zack Weinberg!
3520
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003521- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3522 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3523 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3524 type. This has been fixed now.
3525
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003526- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3527 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3528 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3529
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003530- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3531 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3532 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3533 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3534 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3535 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3536 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3537 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003538 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003539
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003540- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3541 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3542 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003543
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003544- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3545 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3546 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3547 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3548 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3549 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3550 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3551 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003552 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003553 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3554 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3555
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003556- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3557 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3558 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3559 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3560 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3561 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3562 this.)
3563
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003564- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3565 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003566 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003567 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003568 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3569 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003570 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3571 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003572
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003573- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3574 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3575 currently running.
3576
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003577- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3578 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3579 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3580 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3581
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003582- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3583 as directory names.
3584
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003585- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3586 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3587
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003588- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3589 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3590
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003591- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003592 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3593 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003594
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003595- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3596 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3597 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3598 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3599 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3600
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003601- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3602 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3603 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3604 removed.
3605
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003606- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3607 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3608 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3609
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003610- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3611 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3612 to __debug__.
3613
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003614- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3615 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3616 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3617
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003618- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3619 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3620 deprecated now.
3621
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003622- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3623 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3624 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003625
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003626- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3627 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3628 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3629 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3630 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003631
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003632- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3633 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3634
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003635- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3636 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3637 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003638 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003639 is backward compatible.
3640
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003641- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3642 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3643 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3644 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3645 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3646
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003647- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3648 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3649 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3650 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3651 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3652 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003653
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003654- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3655 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3656
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003657- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3658 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3659
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003660- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3661 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3662 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3663 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3664 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3665
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003666- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3667 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3668 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3669
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003670- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003671 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3672
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003673- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3674 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3675 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003676
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003677- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3678 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3679
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003680- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3681 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3682 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3683
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003684- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3685
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003686Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003687-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003688
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003689- Added three operators to the operator module:
3690 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3691 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3692 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3693
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003694- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3695
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003696- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3697 archives.
3698
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003699- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3700 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3701 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3702
3703 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3704
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003705- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3706 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3707 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003708 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003709
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003710- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3711 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3712 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3713 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003714 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3715 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3716 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3717 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003718
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003719- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3720 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003721
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003722- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3723
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003724- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3725 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3726
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003727- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3728 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3729 supported.
3730
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003731- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3732
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003733- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3734 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003735
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003736- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3737 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3738
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003739- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3740
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003741- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3742 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3743
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003744- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3745 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3746 functions but callable type objects.
3747
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003748- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003749 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003750 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003751
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003752- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3753 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003754
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003755- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3756 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003757
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003758- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3759 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3760 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3761 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3762
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003763- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3764 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003765
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003766- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3767 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3768 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3769 and __imul__.
3770
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003771- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003772 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3773 is called.
3774
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003775- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3776 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3777 interpreter was compiled.
3778
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003779- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3780 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3781 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003782 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003783 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3784 1, not 2.
3785
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003786- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3787 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3788 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3789 limit.
3790
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003791- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3792 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3793 bug #623464.
3794
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003795- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3796 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3797 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3798 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3799
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003800Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003801-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003802
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003803- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3804
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003805- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3806 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3807 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3808 with Python 2.3a2.
3809
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003810- os.path exposes getctime.
3811
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003812- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003813 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003814 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003815 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003816 unit tests of floating point results.
3817
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003818- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3819 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3820 has been increased.
3821
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003822- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3823 executed.
3824
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003825- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3826 postinstallation script.
3827
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003828- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3829 test the current module.
3830
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003831- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003832 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3833 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3834 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3835 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3836
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003837- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003838 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003839 Ward's Optik package.
3840
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003841- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3842 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3843 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3844 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3845
3846- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3847 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003848 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003849
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003850- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3851 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3852 shelf are binary pickles.
3853
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003854- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3855 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3856
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003857- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3858 modules are iterators now.
3859
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003860- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3861 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3862 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3863 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3864 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3865 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003866
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003867- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3868 with their entity value.
3869
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003870- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3871
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003872- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3873 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003874
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003875- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3876 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003877 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003878
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003879- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3880 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3881 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3882 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3883 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3884 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3885 main():
3886
3887 import locale
3888 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3889
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003890- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3891 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3892
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003893- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3894 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3895 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3896 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3897 to the new standard.
3898
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003899- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3900 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3901 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3902 an extension to the database.
3903
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003904- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3905 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3906 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3907 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003908 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003909
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003910- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003911 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003912
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003913- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3914 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3915 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3916 bounded integers.
3917
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003918- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3919 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3920 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3921 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3922 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3923 in existence.
3924
3925 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3926 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3927 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3928 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3929 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3930 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3931
3932 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3933 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3934 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3935 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3936
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003937- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3938 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3939 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3940
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003941- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3942
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003943- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3944 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3945 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3946 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3947
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003948- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3949 argument.
3950
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003951- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3952 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3953 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3954 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3955 [SF patch 560794].
3956
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003957- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3958 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3959 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003960 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3961 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3962 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003963
3964- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3965 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003966
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003967- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3968 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3969 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3970 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003971
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003972- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3973 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3974 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3975 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3976 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3977
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003978- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003979
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003980- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3981
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003982- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3983 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3984 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3985 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3986 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3987 identical to None.
3988
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003989- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3990 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3991 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3992 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3993 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3994 results now.
3995
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003996- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3997 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3998
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003999- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4000 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4001 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4002 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4003 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4004 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4005 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4006 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4007
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004008- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4009
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004010- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4011 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4012
4013- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4014 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4015 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4016 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4017 and other systems.
4018
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004019- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4020 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4021 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4022 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 +00004023 work well with these.
4024
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004025- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4026
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004027- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004028 connections.
4029
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004030- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4031 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4032 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4033
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004034- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4035 sets
4036
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004037- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4038 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4039 name.
4040
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004041- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4042 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4043 passed in.
4044
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004045- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004046 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004047 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4048 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004049
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004050- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4051
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004052- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4053
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004054- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4055 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4056 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4057
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004058- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4059 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4060 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4061 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004062 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004063
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004064- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004065 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004066 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004067
4068- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4069 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4070 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4071
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004072- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004073 the value of its expression argument.
4074
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004075- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4076 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4077 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4078
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004079- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4080 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4081 skipstone browser was included.
4082
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004083- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4084 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4085
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004086Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004087-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004088
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004089- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4090 names in addition to accepting file names.
4091
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004092- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4093 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4094 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4095 still used and useful.)
4096
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004097- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4098 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4099 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4100 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004101
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004102- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4103 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4104 the generated binary.
4105
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004106Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004107-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004108
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004109- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4110
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004111- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4112 except in the hands of experts.
4113
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004114- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004115 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4116 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4117 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004118
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004119- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4120 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4121 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4122 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4123 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4124 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4125 builds.
4126
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004127- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4128 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4129 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4130 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4131 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4132 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4133 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4134 new type.
4135
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004136- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004137
4138 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4139 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4140 positive infinities.
4141
4142 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4143 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4144 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4145 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4146 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4147 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4148 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4149
4150 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4151
4152 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4153
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004154- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4155 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4156 size of the executable.
4157
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004158- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4159 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4160 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4161 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004162
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004163- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4164
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004165- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4166 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4167 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004168
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004169- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4170 well as Unix.
4171
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004172- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4173 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4174 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4175 modules in the README file for details.
4176
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004177C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004178-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004179
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004180- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4181 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004182 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004183 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004184 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004185
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004186- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4187 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4188 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4189 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4190 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4191 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004192 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004193 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4194 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4195 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4196 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4197 aligned.)
4198
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004199- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4200 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4201 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4202
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004203- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4204 level.
4205
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004206- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4207 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4208 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4209 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4210 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4211
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004212- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4213 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4214 code.
4215
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004216- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4217 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4218 adjusting for negative indices.
4219
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004220- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4221 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4222 object.
4223
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004224- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4225 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4226 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4227
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004228- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4229 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004230
4231- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4232
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004233- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4234 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4235 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4236 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4237
4238- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4239
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004240- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004241
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004242- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004243 without going through the buffer API.
4244
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004245- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004246
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004247- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4248 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4249 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4250 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4251
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004252- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4253 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4254
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004255- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004256 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4257
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004258New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004259-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004260
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004261- OpenVMS is now supported.
4262
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004263- AtheOS is now supported.
4264
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004265- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4266
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004267- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4268
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004269Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004270-----
4271
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004272- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4273 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4274 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004275
4276Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004277-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004278
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004279- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4280 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4281 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4282 bugs.
4283 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004284 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004285 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4286 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004287 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004288
4289- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004290 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004291
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004292- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4293 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4294
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004295- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4296 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004297 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004298 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4299
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004300- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4301 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4302 use files" uninstall option).
4303
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004304- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4305
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004306- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4307 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4308
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004309- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4310 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4311 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4312
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004313- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4314 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4315 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4316 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4317 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004318 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4319 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4320 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004321
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004322- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004323 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004324 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4325 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4326 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4327 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4328 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4329 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4330 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4331 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4332 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4333 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4334 work around.
4335
4336- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4337 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4338 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4339 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4340 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4341 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4342 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4343 specified with O_CREAT too).
4344
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004345Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004346----
4347
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004348- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004349
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004350- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4351 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4352 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4353
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004354- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4355 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4356 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4357
4358- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4359 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4360 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4361 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4362 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4363 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4364 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4365 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004366
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004367- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4368 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4369 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004370
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004371- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4372 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4373 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4374 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4375 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004376
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004377- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4378 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4379 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004380
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004381- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4382 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004383
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004384- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4385 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4386 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4387 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4388 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004389
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004390- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4391 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4392 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4393
4394- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4395 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4396 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004397
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004398- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4399 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4400 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4401 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004402 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004403
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004404- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4405 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004406
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004407- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4408 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004409
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004410- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004411 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004412 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4413 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004414
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004415
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004416What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004417===============================
4418
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004419*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4420
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004421Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004422--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004423
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004424- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4425 with a custom metaclass.
4426
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004427Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004428-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004429
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004430- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4431 are proxies.
4432
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004433Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004434-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004435
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004436- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4437 very short strings.
4438
4439- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4440 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4441 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4442 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4443 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4444
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004445Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004446-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004447
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004448- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4449 close or delete time).
4450
4451- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4452 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4453
4454- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4455
4456- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004457 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004458
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004459Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004460-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004461
4462Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004463-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004464
4465C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004466-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004467
4468New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004469-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004470
4471Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004472-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004473
4474Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004475-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004476
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004477- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4478
4479- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4480 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4481
4482- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4483 deleted at process exit time.
4484
4485- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4486 in backslash.
4487
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004488Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004489----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004490
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004491- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4492 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4493 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4494
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004495
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004496What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004497===========================
4498
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004499*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4500
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004501Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004502--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004503
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004504- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4505 been extensively updated. See
4506
4507 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4508
4509 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4510
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004511- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4512 deleted!
4513
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004514- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4515 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4516 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4517 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4518 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4519
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004520- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4521
4522 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4523 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4524
4525 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4526 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4527 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4528 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4529 supported anyway.
4530
4531 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4532 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4533
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004534- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4535 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4536 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4537 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4538 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004539
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004540- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4541 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4542 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4543
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004544Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004545-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004546
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004547- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4548 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4549 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4550 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4551 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4552 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004553 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4554 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4555 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4556 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004557
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004558- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4559 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4560 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4561
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004562Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004563-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004564
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004565- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4566
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004567Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004568-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004569
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004570- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4571 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4572 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4573 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4574 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4575 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4576
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004577- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4578
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004579- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4580
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004581- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4582
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004583- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4584 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4585 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4586
4587- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4588
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004589Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004590-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004591
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004592- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4593 off a search on Google.
4594
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004595Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004596-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004597
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004598- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4599 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4600 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4601 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4602 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4603 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4604 other platforms should do likewise.
4605
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004606- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4607 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4608 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4609
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004610C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004611-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004612
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004613- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4614 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4615 producing key-value pairs.
4616
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004617- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004618 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004619 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4620 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4621 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4622 previously went unchallenged.
4623
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004624New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004625-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004626
4627Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004628-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004629
4630Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004631-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004632
4633Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004634----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004635
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004636- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4637 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004638
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004639- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4640 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4641 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4642 home.
4643
4644
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004645What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004646===========================
4647
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004648*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4649
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004650Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004651--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004652
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004653- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4654 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004655
4656 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004657 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004658
4659 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4660 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004661 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004662 This needs to be documented.
4663
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004664- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4665 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4666
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004667- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4668 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4669 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4670
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004671- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4672 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4673
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004674- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4675 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4676 class forbids it).
4677
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004678- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4679 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4680 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4681
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004682- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4683
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004684Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004685-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004686
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004687- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4688 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004689 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004690
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004691- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4692 (like 1 + '').
4693
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004694Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004695-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004696
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004697- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4698 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4699 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4700 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004701 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004702 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4703
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004704- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4705 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4706 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4707 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4708
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004709- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4710 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004711 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4712 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4713 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004714
4715- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4716 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004717
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004718- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4719 bytes on its input.
4720
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004721Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004722-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004723
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004724- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004725 convenience function.
4726
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004727- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4728 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4729 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004730 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4731 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4732 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4733 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4734 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4735 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004736
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004737- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4738 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4739 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4740 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4741
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004742- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4743 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4744 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4745
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004746- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4747 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4748 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4749 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4750
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004751- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4752 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004753 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004754 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4755 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4756 new -l and -e options.
4757
4758- statcache is now deprecated.
4759
4760- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4761 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004762 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004763 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4764 time properly taken into account.
4765
4766- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4767 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4768 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4769 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4770
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004771Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004772-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004773
4774Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004775-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004776
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004777- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4778 is built with libdb3 if available.
4779
4780- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4781
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004782C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004783-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004784
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004785- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4786 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4787 PySequence_Size().
4788
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004789- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4790
4791- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4792 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4793 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4794
4795- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4796 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4797
4798- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4799 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4800
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004801New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004802-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004803
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004804- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4805 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4806
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004807- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4808 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4809
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004810- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4811
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004812Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004813-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004814
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004815- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4816 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4817
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004818Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004819-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004820
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004821Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004822----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004823
4824- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4825 removed completely in the next release.
4826
4827- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4828 OSX.
4829
4830- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4831 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4832
4833- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4834
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004835
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004836What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004837===========================
4838
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004839*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4840
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004841Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004842--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004843
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004844- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004845 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004846 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004847 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4848 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004849 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4850 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004851 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4852 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004853
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004854- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4855 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4856
4857- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4858 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4859
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004860Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004861-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004862
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004863- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4864 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4865 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4866 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4867 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4868 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4869 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4870 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4871
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004872- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4873 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4874 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4875 example).
4876
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004877- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004878 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004879 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004880 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004881
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004882- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4883 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4884 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004885 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004886
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004887- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4888 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4889 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4890 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4891 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4892 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4893
4894 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4895
4896 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4897
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004898Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004899-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004900
4901- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4902
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004903- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4904
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004905- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4906 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004907
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004908- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4909 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4910 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4911 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4912 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4913 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004914 attributes.
4915
4916- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4917 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4918 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004919
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004920- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4921 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4922 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004923
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004924- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4925 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4926 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004927 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4928 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4929
4930- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4931 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004932
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004933Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004934-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004935
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004936- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4937 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4938
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004939- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4940 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4941 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4942 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4943
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004944- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4945 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4946 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4947 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4948
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004949 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4950 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4951 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4952 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4953 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4954 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4955 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4956 without losing information).
4957
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004958- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004959 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4960 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4961 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4962 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4963 module).
4964
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004965 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004966 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4967 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4968 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4969 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004970
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004971- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004972 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4973 encoding.
4974
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004975- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4976 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4977
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004978- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004979 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4980
4981- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4982 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4983 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4984 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4985
4986- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4987
4988- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4989 ON, and OFF.
4990
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004991- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4992 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4993
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004994Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004995-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004996
4997- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4998 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4999 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005000
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005001- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5002 been added: -X and -E.
5003
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005004Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005005-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005006
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005007- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5008 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5009
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005010C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005011-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005012
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005013- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5014 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5015 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5016 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5017 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5018
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005019- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5020 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5021 as long) arguments.
5022
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005023- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5024 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5025 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5026 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5027 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5028 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5029
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005030- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5031 input.
5032
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005033New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005034-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005035
5036Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005037-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005038
5039Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005040-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005041
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005042- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5043 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5044 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5045
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005046- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5047 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5048 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005049 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005050
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005051 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5052 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5053 import signal
5054 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005055
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005056 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005057 while 1:
5058 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005059 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005060 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5061 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5062 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5063 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005064
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005065
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005066What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5067===========================
5068
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005069*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5070
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005071Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005072--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005073
5074- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5075 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5076 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5077
5078- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5079 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5080 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5081 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5082 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5083 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5084 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005085
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005086- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005087 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005088 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5089 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5090 associate a docstring with a property.
5091
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005092- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5093 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5094 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5095 other built-in object types.
5096
5097- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5098 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5099 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5100 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5101 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5102
5103- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5104 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5105
5106- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5107 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005108 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005109 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5110 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5111 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5112 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5113 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5114
5115- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5116 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5117 class.
5118
5119- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5120 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5121 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5122 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5123
5124- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5125 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5126 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5127 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5128
5129- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5130 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5131
5132- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5133 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5134 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5135 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5136 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005137 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005138 with the same value as s.
5139
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005140- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5141
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005142Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005143----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005144
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005145- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5146
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005147- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5148 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5149 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5150 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5151 objects.
5152
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005153- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5154 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005155 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5156 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5157
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005158- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5159 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5160 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5161
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005162Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005163-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005164
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005165- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5166 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5167 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5168 by the instances.
5169
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005170- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5171 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5172 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5173
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005174- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5175 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5176 before the entire comparison is complete.
5177
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005178- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5179 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5180 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5181
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005182- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5183 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5184 getwriter().
5185
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005186- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5187 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5188
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005189- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005190 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5191 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5192
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005193- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5194 iterable object.
5195
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005196- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5197 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005198
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005199- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5200 authentication.
5201
5202- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5203 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005204
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005205- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005206 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5207 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5208 a sample driver.)
5209
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005210Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005211-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005212
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005213- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5214 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5215 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5216 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5217 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5218 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5219 kernel has large file support.
5220
5221- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5222 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5223 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5224 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5225 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5226
5227- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5228 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5229 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5230
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005231C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005232-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005233
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005234- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5235 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5236
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005237New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005238-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005239
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005240- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5241 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5242
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005243Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005244-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005245
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005246- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5247 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5248 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5249 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5250 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5251
5252- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5253 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5254 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5255 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5256
5257- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5258 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5259
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005260Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005261-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005262
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005263- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005264 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5265 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005266
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005267
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005268What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5269===========================
5270
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005271*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5272
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005273Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005274----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005275
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005276- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5277 big to represent as a C double.
5278
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005279- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5280 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5281 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5282 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5283 restriction).
5284
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005285- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5286 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5287 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5288 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5289 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5290
5291 >>> dir([])
5292 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5293 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5294 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5295 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5296 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5297 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5298 'reverse', 'sort']
5299
5300 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5301
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005302- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005303 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5304 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5305 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5306 OverflowError exception.
5307
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005308- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005309 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005310 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5311 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5312 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5313 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5314 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005315 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005316 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5317 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5318
5319 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5320 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5321 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5322 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005323
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005324- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005325 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5326 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5327 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5328 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5329 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5330 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5331 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5332 once it is created.
5333
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005334- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5335 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5336 (key, value) pairs.
5337
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005338- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005339 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5340 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5341
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005342- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5343 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5344 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5345 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5346 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005347
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005348- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005349 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5350 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5351
5352 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5353
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005354- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005355 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5356
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005357Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005358-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005359
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005360- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005361 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5362 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005363
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005364- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5365 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5366 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5367 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5368 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5369 in this area anymore).
5370
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005371- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5372 threading.Timer.
5373
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005374- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5375 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5376
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005377- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005378 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5379
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005380- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005381 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5382 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5383 converted to Python longs.
5384
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005385- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005386 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5387
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005388- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5389 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5390 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5391
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005392Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005393-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005394
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005395- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5396 division operators as per PEP 238.
5397
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005398Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005399-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005400
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005401- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5402 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5403 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5404 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5405
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005406C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005407-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005408
5409- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005410
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005411- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5412 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005413 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005414
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005415 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5416 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005417 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005418 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005419
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005420- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005421 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5422 module:
5423
5424 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005425
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005426 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5427 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005428
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005429 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5430 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005431
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005432 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5433
5434 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5435
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005436- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005437 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5438 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5439 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005440
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005441New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005442-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005443
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005444- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5445 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5446 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5447 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5448 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005449
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005450Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005451-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005452
5453Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005454-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005455
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005456- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5457 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5458 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5459 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005460 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5461 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5462 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5463 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5464 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005465
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005466- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005467 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5468
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005469
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005470What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5471===========================
5472
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005473*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5474
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005475Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005476-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005477
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005478- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5479 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5480
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005481- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5482 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5483 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005484
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005485- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5486 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5487 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5488 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005489
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005490- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5491
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005492- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005493
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005494Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005495-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005496
5497- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005498 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005499 the module docstring for details.
5500
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005501Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005502-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005503
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005504- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005505 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5506 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5507 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005508
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005509- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5510 Nick Mathewson.
5511
5512Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005513----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005514
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005515- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5516 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5517 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5518 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5519 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5520 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5521 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5522 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5523
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005524- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5525 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5526 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5527 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5528
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005529- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5530 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5531 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5532 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5533 come a long way).
5534
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005535- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5536 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5537 write filters for these warnings).
5538
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005539- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5540 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5541 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5542 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5543 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5544
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005545- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5546 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5547 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5548 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5549 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5550 older distribution.
5551
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005552Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005553-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005554
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005555- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5556 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005557 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005558
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005559- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5560 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5561 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5562
5563- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5564
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005565- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5566
5567- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5568
5569- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5570
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005571- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005572
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005573- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5574
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005575New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005576-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005577
5578C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005579-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005580
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005581- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5582 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5583 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5584 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5585 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5586 against buffer overruns.
5587
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005588- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005589 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5590 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005591 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5592 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5593 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5594
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005595- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5596 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5597 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5598 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5599 deprecated.
5600
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005601Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005602-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005603
5604- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5605 relevant is found.
5606
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005607
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005608What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005609===========================
5610
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005611*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5612
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005613Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005614----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005615
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005616- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5617 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5618 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5619 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5620 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5621 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5622 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5623 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005624 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005625 repaired.
5626
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005627- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005628 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005629 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5630 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5631 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5632 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5633 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5634 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5635 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5636 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5637
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005638- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5639 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5640 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5641 leading BMO character).
5642
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005643- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5644 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5645 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5646
5647 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5648 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5649 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005650
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005651 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5652 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5653 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5654 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5655 for various simple to use conversions.
5656
5657 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5658 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5659
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005660 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5661 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5662 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5663 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5664 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5665 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5666 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5667 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5668 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5669 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5670 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5671 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5672 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5673 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5674 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005675
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005676- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5677 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5678 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005679 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005680 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005681
5682 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005683 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5684 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5685 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5686 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5687 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005688 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5689 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005690
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005691 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5692 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5693 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005694 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005695
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005696- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5697 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5698 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5699 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5700 floating arithmetic,
5701
5702 x = 9007199254740992.0
5703 print long(x)
5704
5705 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5706 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5707 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5708 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5709 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5710 functions are of good quality).
5711
5712 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5713 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5714 algorithms to break.
5715
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005716- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5717 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5718 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5719 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5720 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5721 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5722 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5723 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5724 order.
5725
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005726- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5727 operation along the most common code paths.
5728
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005729- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5730 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5731
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005732- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5733 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5734 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5735 {}.update(UserDict())
5736
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005737- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5738 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5739 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5740 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5741 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5742 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5743 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5744 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5745
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005746- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005747 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005748
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005749 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005750 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5751 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005752 join() method of strings
5753 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005754 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5755 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005756 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005757 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005758
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005759- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5760 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5761
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005762- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5763 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5764
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005765- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5766 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5767 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5768 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5769
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005770- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5771 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005772 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005773 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5774 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005775
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005776- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5777
5778
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005779Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005780-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005781
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005782- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005783 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005784 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5785 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5786
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005787- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5788 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5789
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005790- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5791 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5792 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5793 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5794
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005795- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5796 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5797 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5798
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005799- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5800
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005801- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5802
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005803- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5804 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5805 that are still imported into string.py).
5806
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005807- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5808
5809- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5810 Now it does.
5811
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005812- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5813
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005814- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5815 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5816 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5817 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5818 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005819 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5820 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005821
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005822- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5823 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5824 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5825 'help(object)'.
5826
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005827Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005828-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005829
5830- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005831 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005832 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5833 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5834
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005835- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005836 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5837 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005838
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005839C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005840-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005841
5842- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5843 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005844
5845----
5846
5847**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**