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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +000015- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
16
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +000017- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
18 new documentation and modified profiler and bdb modules for more details
19
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +000020- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
21
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +000022- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
23
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +000024- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
25 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
26
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +000027- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
28 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
29 Fixes bug #858016 .
30
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +000031- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
32 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
33 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
34
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +000035- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
36 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
37 improves their performance (about 35%).
38
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +000039- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
40 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
41 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
42
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +000043- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
44 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
45 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
46 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
47
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000048- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
49 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
50 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
51 length is not known).
52
53- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
54 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +000055 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
56 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000057 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
58
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +000059- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
60 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
61
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +000062- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
63 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
64 keyword arguments.
65
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +000066- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
67 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
68 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
69
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +000070- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
71 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
72 cases.
73
74- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
75 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
76 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
77 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
78 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
79 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
80 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
81 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
82 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
83 a release build.
84
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +000085- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
86 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
87
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000088- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +000089 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000090
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +000091- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
92 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
93 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
94 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
95 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
96 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
97 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
98 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
99 destroyed.
100
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000101- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
102 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
103 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
104 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
105 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
106 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
107 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
108 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
109
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000110- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
111 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
112 character other than a space.
113
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000114- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
115 by the function object or by the method object, the function
116 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
117 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
118 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
119 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
120 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
121 attributes with the same name.
122
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000123- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
124 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
125 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
126 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
127 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
128 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
129 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
130 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
131 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
132 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
133 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
134 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
135 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
136 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000137
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000138- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
139 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
140 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
141 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
142 This has been repaired.
143
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000144- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
145
146- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
147
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000148- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
149 over a sequence.
150
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000151- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
152 from any iterable.
153
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000154- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
155
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000156- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
157 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
158 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
159 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
160 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
161 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
162 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
163 records with equal keys is unchanged).
164
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000165- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
166 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
167 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
168
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000169- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
170 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
171 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
172 freelist.
173
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000174- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
175 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
176
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000177- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
178 number.
179
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000180- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
181 a TypeError exception.
182
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000183- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
184 820195.
185
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000186- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
187 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
188 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
189
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000190- str and unicode builtin types now have rsplit() method that is
191 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
192 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000193
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000194- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
195 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
196 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
197
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000198- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
199 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
200 method is called as necessary.
201
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000202- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
203 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
204 the first call.
205
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000206
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000207Extension modules
208-----------------
209
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000210- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
211 fewer false positives.
212
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000213- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
214 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
215
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000216- Bug #920575: A problem that _locale module segfaults on
217 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
218
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000219- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
220 scheme has been updated the same as for list objects. The improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000221 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
222 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
223 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000224
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000225- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
226 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
227 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
228 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
229
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000230- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
231 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
232 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
233 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
234 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
235 #897625.
236
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000237- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
238 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
239
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000240- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
241 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
242 and pops on either side of the deque.
243
244- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
245 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
246
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000247- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
248 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
249 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
250 other functions that expect a function argument.
251
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000252- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
253
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000254- os.getsid was added.
255
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000256- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
257 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
258 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
259
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000260- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
261
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000262- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
263
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000264- readline.clear_history was added.
265
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000266- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
267
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000268- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
269
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000270- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
271
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000272- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
273
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000274- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
275
276- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
277
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000278- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
279
280- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
281
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000282- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
283 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
284 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
285
286- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
287 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
288 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
289 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
290 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
291 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
292 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
293
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000294- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
295 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
296 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
297 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000298
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000299- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
300 iterators from a single iterable.
301
302- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
303 of raising a TypeError exception.
304
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000305- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
306 as parameter.
307
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000308Library
309-------
310
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000311- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
312
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000313- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
314 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
315
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000316- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
317 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
318 type pattern with the same value exists.
319
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000320- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
321 when run from the command prompt).
322
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000323- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
324 not taken into consideration when caching value.
325
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000326- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
327 default sort).
328
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000329- Added global runctx function to profile module
330
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000331- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
332
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000333- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
334
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000335- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
336
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000337- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
338 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
339 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
340 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
341 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
342 accordingly.
343
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000344- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
345 decoding standards.
346
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000347- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
348 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
349 called for all requests.
350
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000351- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
352 they are passed to the compiler.
353
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000354- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
355 indent, width and depth.
356
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000357- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
358 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
359
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000360- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
361 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
362
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000363- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
364
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000365- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
366
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000367- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
368
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000369- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
370 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
371
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000372- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
373 for better performance
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000374
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000375- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
376 a string).
377
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000378- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
379
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000380- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
381
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000382- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
383
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000384- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
385
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000386- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
387 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
388 list of fieldnames.
389
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000390- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
391 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
392
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000393- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
394
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000395- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
396 empty lists.
397
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000398- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
399 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
400 and shelves.
401
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000402- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
403 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
404
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000405- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000406 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
407 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000408
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000409- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
410 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000411 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000412
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000413- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000414 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
415 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
416
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000417- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
418 and removed in Py2.4.
419
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000420- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
421
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000422- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
423
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000424Tools/Demos
425-----------
426
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000427- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
428 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
429
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000430- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
431
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000432- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
433 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
434 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
435 destination in situations where both files are given.
436
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000437- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
438 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
439 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
440 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
441
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000442- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
443
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000444- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
445 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
446 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
447 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
448 now.
449
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000450- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
451 in effect
452
453- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
454 C-c C-h
455
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000456- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
457 -d option was given.
458
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000459Build
460-----
461
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000462- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
463 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
464
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000465- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
466 removed.
467
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000468- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
469 supported (see PEP 11).
470
471- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
472
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000473- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
474
475- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
476 (see PEP 11).
477
478- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
479 sizeof(char) must be 1.
480
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000481C API
482-----
483
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000484- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
485 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000486 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
487 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000488
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000489- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
490 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
491
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000492- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
493 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
494 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
495 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
496 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
497
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000498- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
499 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
500 about 10% faster.
501
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000502- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
503 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
504
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000505- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
506 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
507 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
508 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
509
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000510New platforms
511-------------
512
513Tests
514-----
515
516Windows
517-------
518
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000519- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
520 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
521 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
522 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
523
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000524- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
525 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
526 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
527
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000528Mac
529----
530
531
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000532What's New in Python 2.3 final?
533===============================
534
535*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
536
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000537IDLE
538----
539
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000540- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
541 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
542 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
543 context-menu actions.
544
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000545- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
546 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
547 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
548 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
549 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
550 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
551 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
552 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
553 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
554
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000555
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000556What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
557=============================================
558
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000559*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000560
561Core and builtins
562-----------------
563
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000564- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000565 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000566 comment at the end are still unsupported.
567
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000568Extension modules
569-----------------
570
571- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
572 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
573 than once. This has been fixed.
574
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000575- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
576 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
577 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
578 call.
579
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000580- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
581
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000582Library
583-------
584
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000585- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
586 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
587
588- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
589 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
590 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
591 restored.
592
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000593IDLE
594----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000595
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000596- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000597
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000598Build
599-----
600
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000601- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
602 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
603
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000604C API
605-----
606
607Windows
608-------
609
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000610- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
611 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
612
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000613- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
614
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000615Mac
616---
617
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000618- Various fixes to pimp.
619
620- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
621
622- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
623 more problems than it solves.
624
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000625
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000626What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
627=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000628
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000629*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
630
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000631Core and builtins
632-----------------
633
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000634- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
635 by sys.setcheckinterval().
636
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000637- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
638 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000639 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000640
641- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
642 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
643 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000644 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000645
646- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
647 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000648
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000649- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
650 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
651 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
652
653- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000654 770247.
655
656- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000657
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000658Extension modules
659-----------------
660
661- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
662 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
663
664- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
665
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000666- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
667
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000668- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
669 contained within the _strptime module.
670
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000671- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
672 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
673
674- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000675 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
676
677- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
678 the find_class attribute, if present.
679
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000680- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000681
682 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
683 (SF bug 763298).
684
685 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000686 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
687 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
688 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000689
690 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
691
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000692Library
693-------
694
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000695- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
696
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000697- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
698 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
699 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
700 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
701 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
702 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
703 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
704 or Tester().
705
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000706- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
707 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
708 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
709 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
710 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
711 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
712 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
713 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
714 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000715
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000716 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000717
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000718- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
719 weren't before was an oversight.
720
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000721- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
722 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
723
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000724- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
725 when there are no lines.
726
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000727- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
728 which could occur with Tk 8.4
729
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000730- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
731 to child processes.
732
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000733- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
734
735- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
736
737- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
738 xmlrpclib.
739
740- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
741 responses.
742
743- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
744 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
745
746- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
747 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
748 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
749
750- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
751 used as patterns.
752
753- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
754 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
755 than Tk 8.3.
756
757- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
758
759- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000760
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000761Tools/Demos
762-----------
763
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000764- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
765
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000766- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
767
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000768- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000769
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000770Build
771-----
772
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000773- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
774
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000775- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
776
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000777- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
778 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000779
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000780- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
781 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
782 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000783
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000784C API
785-----
786
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000787- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
788 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
789
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000790Windows
791-------
792
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000793- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
794 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
795 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
796 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
797 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
798 Python exception ::
799
800 thread.error: can't start new thread
801
802 is raised now.
803
804- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
805 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
806 instead of from DLL teardown.
807
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000808Mac
809---
810
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000811- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000812 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000813 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
814 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
815 the executable in the bundle.
816
817- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000818
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000819- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
820
821- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
822 on Panther.
823
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000824What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
825================================
826
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000827*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000828
829Core and builtins
830-----------------
831
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000832- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
833 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
834 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
835 with the -i option.
836
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000837- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
838 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
839
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000840- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
841 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
842
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000843- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
844 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
845 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
846 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
847 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
848 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
849 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
850 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
851 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
852 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
853 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
854 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
855 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000856
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000857- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
858 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
859 embedded in a lambda expression.
860
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000861- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
862 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
863 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
864 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
865 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
866
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000867- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
868 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
869 matches the restriction on classic classes.
870
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000871- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
872 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
873
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000874- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
875 It's writable again.
876
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000877- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
878 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
879 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000880 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000881
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000882- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
883 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
884 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
885
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000886Extension modules
887-----------------
888
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000889- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
890 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
891
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000892- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
893 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
894 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
895 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
896
897- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
898 collection.
899
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000900- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
901 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
902 unique within a single program run.
903
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000904- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
905 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
906
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000907- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
908 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
909
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000910- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
911 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000912
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000913- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
914
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000915- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
916 Fixes SF bug #730685.
917
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000918- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
919 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
920 for many BSD-derived systems.
921
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000922
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000923Library
924-------
925
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000926- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
927 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
928 primary ones:
929
930 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
931 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
932 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
933
934 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
935 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
936 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
937 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
938 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
939 framework features (which doctest lacks).
940
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000941- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
942 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
943 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
944 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
945 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
946 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
947 argument.
948
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000949- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
950 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
951 in the archive.
952
953- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
954 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
955
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000956- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
957 569574).
958
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000959- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
960 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
961 no more.
962
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000963- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
964 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
965 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
966 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
967 code coverage.
968
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000969- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
970 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
971 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000972 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
973 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000974
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000975- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
976 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
977 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000978 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000979
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000980- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
981
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000982- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
983 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
984 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
985 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
986
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000987- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
988 handling.
989
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000990- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
991 __doc__ of data descriptors.
992
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000993- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
994 in socket.py.
995
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000996- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
997
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000998- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
999 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1000 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1001 opener with proxy support.
1002
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001003- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1004
1005- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1006
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001007Tools/Demos
1008-----------
1009
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001010- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1011
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001012- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1013
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001014- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1015 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001016
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001017- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1018 files.
1019
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001020Build
1021-----
1022
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001023- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001024 different root directory.
1025
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001026C API
1027-----
1028
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001029- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1030 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1031 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1032 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1033 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1034 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1035 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1036 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1037 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1038 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1039
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001040- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1041 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1042 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1043 from Python.
1044
1045
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001046New platforms
1047-------------
1048
1049None this time.
1050
1051Tests
1052-----
1053
1054- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1055 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1056
1057Windows
1058-------
1059
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001060- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1061
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001062- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1063 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1064 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1065 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1066 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1067 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1068 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1069 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1070 that's what it's for.
1071
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001072Mac
1073---
1074
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001075- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1076 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1077 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1078 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001079- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1080 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1081- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001082
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001083SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1084------------------------------------
1085
1086430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1087598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1088622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1089661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1090683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1091697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1092713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1093724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1094727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1095729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1096730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1097731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1098732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1099733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1100735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1101740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1102744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1103745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1104747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1105749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1106751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1107753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1108755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1109757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1110760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1111
1112
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001113What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1114================================
1115
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001116*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001117
1118Core and builtins
1119-----------------
1120
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001121- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1122 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1123
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001124- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1125 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1126 and cannot be strings).
1127
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001128- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1129 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1130 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1131 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1132
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001133- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1134 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1135 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1136 Python itself.
1137
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001138- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1139 the referenced object, if it has one.
1140
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001141- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1142 the thread started at
1143 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1144
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001145- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1146 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1147 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1148 placed on a list index.
1149
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001150- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1151 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1152 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1153 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1154
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001155- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1156 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1157 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1158 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1159 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1160 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1161 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1162
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001163- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1164 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1165 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1166 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1167 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1168
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001169- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1170 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001171
1172- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1173 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1174 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1175 #693195.)
1176
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001177- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1178 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001179
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001180- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001181 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001182 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1183 interpreter executions, would fail.
1184
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001185- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001186 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001187 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001188
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001189Extension modules
1190-----------------
1191
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001192- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1193 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1194 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1195 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1196
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001197- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1198 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1199
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001200- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1201 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1202 and Greg Chapman.)
1203
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001204- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1205 recursively.
1206
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001207- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001208 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1209 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1210 leaks.
1211
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001212- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1213
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001214- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1215 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1216 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1217 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1218 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1219 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1220 #705836.
1221
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001222- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001223 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1224
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001225- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1226 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1227 See SF bug #692416.
1228
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001229- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1230 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1231
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001232- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1233 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1234 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001235
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001236- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001237 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1238 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1239
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001240- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1241 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1242 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1243 timeouts to work properly.
1244
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001245Library
1246-------
1247
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001248- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1249 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1250 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1251 future release.
1252
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001253- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1254 for querying platform dependent features.
1255
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001256- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001257
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001258- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1259 pickle protocol versions.
1260
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001261- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1262 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1263 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1264
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001265- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1266
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001267- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1268 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1269 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1270 modules.
1271
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001272- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1273 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1274 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1275
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001276- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1277 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1278
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001279- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1280 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1281 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1282
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001283- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001284 MS Office extensions.
1285
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001286- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1287 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1288
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001289- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1290 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1291
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001292- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1293 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1294 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1295 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1296 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1297 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1298
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001299- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1300 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1301 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001302
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001303- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1304 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1305 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1306
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001307- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1308
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001309- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1310 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1311 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1312
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001313Tools/Demos
1314-----------
1315
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001316- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1317 See the module docstring for details.
1318
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001319Build
1320-----
1321
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001322- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1323 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001324
1325C API
1326-----
1327
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001328- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1329
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001330- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1331 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1332 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1333
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001334- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1335 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001336
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001337 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1338 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1339 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001340
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001341- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001342 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1343
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001344- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1345 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1346 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001347
1348New platforms
1349-------------
1350
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001351None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001352
1353Tests
1354-----
1355
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001356- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1357 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001358
1359Windows
1360-------
1361
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001362- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1363 function.
1364
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001365- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1366 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001367
1368Mac
1369---
1370
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001371- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1372 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001373
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001374- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1375 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001376
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001377- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1378 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1379 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001380
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001381- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001382 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1383 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001384
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001385- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1386 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001387
1388
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001389What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1390=================================
1391
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001392*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001393
1394Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001395-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001396
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001397- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1398 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1399 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1400
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001401- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1402 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1403 (SF patch #664376.)
1404
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001405- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1406 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1407 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1408 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1409 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1410 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001411 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001412
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001413- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1414 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1415 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1416 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001417 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001418
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001419- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1420 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1421 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1422 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1423 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1424 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1425 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1426 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1427 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1428 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1429 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1430
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001431- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1432 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1433 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1434 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1435 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1436 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1437
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001438- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1439 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1440
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001441- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1442 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1443 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1444 case.)
1445
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001446- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1447 passed as unicode strings.
1448
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001449- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1450 See SF bug #683467.
1451
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001452- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1453 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1454
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001455- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1456
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001457- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1458
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001459- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1460 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1461 arguments.
1462
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001463- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1464 See SF bug #667147.
1465
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001466- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001467 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001468 See SF bug #676155.
1469
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001470- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001471 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001472 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1473 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1474 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1475 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1476 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1477 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001478
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001479Extension modules
1480-----------------
1481
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001482- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1483 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1484 tp_as_number pointer.
1485
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001486- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1487 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1488 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1489 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1490 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1491
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001492- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1493
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001494- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1495
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001496- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001497 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001498 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1499 patch #678531.)
1500
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001501- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1502 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1503
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001504- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1505 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1506
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001507- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1508
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001509- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1510 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1511 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1512
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001513- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1514
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001515- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1516 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1517
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001518- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001519
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001520- datetime changes:
1521
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001522 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1523
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001524 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1525 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1526 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1527 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1528 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1529 now.
1530
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001531 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001532 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1533 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001534
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001535 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001536 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001537 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1538 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1539 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1540 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001541
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001542 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1543 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1544 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001545 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1546
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001547 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1548 by a later example coded by Guido.
1549
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001550 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001551 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1552 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1553 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001554 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1555 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1556
1557 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1558 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1559 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1560 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1561 tzinfo subclass instance.
1562
1563 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1564 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1565 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1566 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1567 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1568 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1569 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1570 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001571
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001572 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1573 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1574 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1575 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1576 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001577 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1578
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001579 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001580
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001581 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1582 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1583 as a naive datetime object.
1584
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001585 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1586 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1587 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1588
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001589 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1590 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1591 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1592 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1593 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1594 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1595 comparison.
1596
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001597 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1598 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1599 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1600 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001601 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001602
1603 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001604
1605 and ::
1606
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001607 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1608
1609 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1610 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1611 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1612 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1613
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001614 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1615 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1616 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1617 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1618 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1619
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001620 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1621 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001622 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1623 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001624
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001625Library
1626-------
1627
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001628- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1629 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1630
1631- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1632 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1633 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1634 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1635 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1636 See PEP 307 for details.
1637
1638- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1639 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1640
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001641- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1642 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001643 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001644 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1645 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001646 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001647
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001648- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1649 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1650
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001651- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1652 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1653 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1654
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001655- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1656
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001657- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1658 exception.
1659
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001660- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1661 class.
1662
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001663- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1664 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1665 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1666
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001667- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1668 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1669
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001670- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001671 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1672 See SF bug #659228.
1673
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001674- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1675 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1676 See SF patch #651082.
1677
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001678- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001679
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001680- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1681 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1682
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001683- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001684 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001685
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001686- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1687 DOS paths from other platforms.
1688
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001689Tools/Demos
1690-----------
1691
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001692- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1693 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1694 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1695 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1696 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1697 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1698 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1699 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1700 example:
1701
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001702 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1703 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001704
1705 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1706
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001707
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001708Build
1709-----
1710
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001711- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1712 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1713 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001714 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1715
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001716 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1717
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001718- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1719 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1720 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1721 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1722 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1723 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1724 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1725 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1726 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1727
1728- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1729 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1730 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1731 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1732
1733- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1734 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1735
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001736C API
1737-----
1738
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001739- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1740 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001741
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001742- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1743 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1744 tp_as_number pointer.
1745
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001746- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1747 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1748 (SF #681367)
1749
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001750- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1751 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1752 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1753 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001754
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001755Tests
1756-----
1757
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001758- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001759 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1760 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1761 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1762 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1763 pydoc.)
1764
1765- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1766
1767- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001768
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001769Windows
1770-------
1771
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001772- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1773 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1774 time).
1775
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001776- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1777 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1778
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001779- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1780 release without strong cryptography.
1781
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001782- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001783 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001784
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001785- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1786 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1787
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001788Mac
1789---
1790
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001791- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1792 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001793
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001794- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1795 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1796 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001797
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001798- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1799 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001800
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001801- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1802 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1803 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1804 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001805
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001806- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001807 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1808 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1809 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001810
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001811
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001812What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001813=================================
1814
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001815*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001816
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001817Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001818--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001819
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001820- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1821
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001822- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1823 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001824 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001825 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001826 a different meaning than before.
1827
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001828- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001829 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001830 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001831
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001832- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001833 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001834 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001835
1836- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1837 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1838 and deallocation.
1839
1840- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1841 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1842
1843- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1844 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1845 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1846 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1847 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1848
1849- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1850 now detected by the garbage collector.
1851
1852- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1853 [SF bug 519621]
1854
1855- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1856 identifier.
1857
1858- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1859 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1860 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1861 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1862 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1863 [SF bug 563060]
1864
1865- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1866 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1867 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1868 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1869 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1870
1871- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1872 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1873 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1874
1875- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1876
1877- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1878 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1879 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1880 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1881 state of the slots would be lost.)
1882
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001883Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001884-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001885
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001886- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001887 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1888 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1889 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1890 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001891 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1892 Jython 2.1.
1893
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001894- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001895 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001896 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1897 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1898 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1899 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1900 these, see PEP 302.
1901
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001902- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1903 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1904 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1905
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001906- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1907 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1908 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1909
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001910- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1911 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1912 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1913
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001914- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1915 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1916 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1917 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1918 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1919 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1920 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1921 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1922 releases or implementations.
1923
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001924- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001925 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1926 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001927
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001928- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1929 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1930
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001931- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1932 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1933 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1934
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001935- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1936 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1937
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001938- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1939 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001940 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1941 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001942
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001943- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1944 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1945 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1946 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1947 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1948
1949 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1950 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1951 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1952 pattern.
1953
1954 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1955 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1956 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1957 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1958
1959 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1960 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1961 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1962 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1963 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1964 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1965
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001966- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1967 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1968 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1969 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1970 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1971 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1972 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1973 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001974
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001975- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1976 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1977 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1978 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1979 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001980 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1981 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1982 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1983 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1984 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1985 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1986 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001987
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001988- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1989 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1990
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001991- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1992 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1993 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1994 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1995 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1996 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1997 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1998 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1999 to Zack Weinberg!
2000
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002001- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2002 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2003 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2004 type. This has been fixed now.
2005
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002006- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2007 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2008 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2009
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002010- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2011 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2012 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2013 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2014 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2015 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2016 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2017 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002018 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002019
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002020- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2021 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2022 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002023
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002024- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2025 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2026 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2027 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2028 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2029 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2030 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2031 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002032 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002033 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2034 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2035
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002036- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2037 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2038 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2039 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2040 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2041 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2042 this.)
2043
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002044- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2045 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002046 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002047 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002048 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2049 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002050 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2051 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002052
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002053- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2054 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2055 currently running.
2056
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002057- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2058 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2059 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2060 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2061
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002062- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2063 as directory names.
2064
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002065- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2066 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2067
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002068- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2069 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2070
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002071- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002072 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2073 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002074
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002075- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2076 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2077 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2078 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2079 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2080
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002081- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2082 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2083 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2084 removed.
2085
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002086- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2087 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2088 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2089
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002090- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2091 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2092 to __debug__.
2093
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002094- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2095 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2096 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2097
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002098- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2099 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2100 deprecated now.
2101
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002102- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2103 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2104 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002105
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002106- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2107 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2108 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2109 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2110 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002111
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002112- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2113 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2114
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002115- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2116 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2117 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002118 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002119 is backward compatible.
2120
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002121- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2122 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2123 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2124 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2125 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2126
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002127- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2128 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2129 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2130 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2131 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2132 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002133
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002134- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2135 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2136
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002137- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2138 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2139
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002140- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2141 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2142 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2143 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2144 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2145
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002146- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2147 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2148 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2149
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002150- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002151 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2152
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002153- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2154 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2155 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002156
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002157- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2158 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2159
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002160- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2161 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2162 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2163
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002164- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2165
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002166Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002167-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002168
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002169- Added three operators to the operator module:
2170 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2171 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2172 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2173
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002174- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2175
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002176- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2177 archives.
2178
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002179- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2180 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2181 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2182
2183 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2184
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002185- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2186 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2187 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002188 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002189
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002190- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2191 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2192 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2193 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002194 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2195 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2196 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2197 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002198
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002199- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2200 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002201
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002202- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2203
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002204- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2205 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2206
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002207- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2208 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2209 supported.
2210
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002211- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2212
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002213- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2214 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002215
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002216- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2217 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2218
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002219- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2220
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002221- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2222 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2223
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002224- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2225 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2226 functions but callable type objects.
2227
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002228- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002229 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002230 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002231
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002232- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2233 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002234
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002235- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2236 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002237
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002238- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2239 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2240 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2241 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2242
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002243- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2244 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002245
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002246- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2247 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2248 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2249 and __imul__.
2250
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002251- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002252 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2253 is called.
2254
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002255- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2256 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2257 interpreter was compiled.
2258
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002259- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2260 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2261 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002262 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002263 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2264 1, not 2.
2265
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002266- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2267 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2268 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2269 limit.
2270
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002271- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2272 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2273 bug #623464.
2274
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002275- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2276 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2277 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2278 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2279
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002280Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002281-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002282
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002283- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2284
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002285- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2286 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2287 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2288 with Python 2.3a2.
2289
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002290- os.path exposes getctime.
2291
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002292- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002293 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002294 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002295 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002296 unit tests of floating point results.
2297
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002298- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2299 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2300 has been increased.
2301
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002302- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2303 executed.
2304
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002305- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2306 postinstallation script.
2307
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002308- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2309 test the current module.
2310
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002311- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002312 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2313 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2314 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2315 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2316
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002317- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002318 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002319 Ward's Optik package.
2320
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002321- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2322 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2323 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2324 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2325
2326- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2327 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002328 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002329
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002330- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2331 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2332 shelf are binary pickles.
2333
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002334- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2335 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2336
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002337- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2338 modules are iterators now.
2339
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002340- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2341 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2342 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2343 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2344 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2345 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002346
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002347- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2348 with their entity value.
2349
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002350- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2351
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002352- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2353 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002354
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002355- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2356 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002357 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002358
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002359- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2360 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2361 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2362 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2363 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2364 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2365 main():
2366
2367 import locale
2368 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2369
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002370- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2371 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2372
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002373- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2374 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2375 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2376 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2377 to the new standard.
2378
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002379- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2380 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2381 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2382 an extension to the database.
2383
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002384- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2385 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2386 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2387 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002388 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002389
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002390- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002391 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002392
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002393- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2394 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2395 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2396 bounded integers.
2397
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002398- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2399 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2400 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2401 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2402 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2403 in existence.
2404
2405 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2406 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2407 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2408 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2409 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2410 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2411
2412 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2413 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2414 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2415 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2416
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002417- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2418 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2419 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2420
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002421- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2422
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002423- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2424 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2425 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2426 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2427
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002428- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2429 argument.
2430
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002431- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2432 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2433 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2434 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2435 [SF patch 560794].
2436
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002437- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2438 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2439 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002440 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2441 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2442 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002443
2444- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2445 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002446
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002447- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2448 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2449 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2450 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002451
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002452- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2453 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2454 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2455 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2456 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2457
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002458- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002459
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002460- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2461
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002462- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2463 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2464 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2465 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2466 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2467 identical to None.
2468
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002469- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2470 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2471 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2472 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2473 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2474 results now.
2475
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002476- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2477 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2478
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002479- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2480 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2481 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2482 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2483 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2484 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2485 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2486 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2487
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002488- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2489
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002490- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2491 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2492
2493- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2494 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2495 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2496 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2497 and other systems.
2498
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002499- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2500 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2501 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2502 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 +00002503 work well with these.
2504
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002505- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2506
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002507- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002508 connections.
2509
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002510- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2511 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2512 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2513
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002514- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2515 sets
2516
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002517- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2518 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2519 name.
2520
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002521- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2522 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2523 passed in.
2524
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002525- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002526 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002527 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2528 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002529
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002530- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2531
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002532- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2533
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002534- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2535 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2536 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2537
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002538- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2539 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2540 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2541 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002542 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002543
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002544- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002545 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002546 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002547
2548- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2549 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2550 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2551
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002552- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002553 the value of its expression argument.
2554
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002555- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2556 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2557 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2558
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002559- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2560 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2561 skipstone browser was included.
2562
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002563- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2564 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2565
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002566Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002567-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002568
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002569- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2570 names in addition to accepting file names.
2571
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002572- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2573 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2574 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2575 still used and useful.)
2576
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002577- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2578 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2579 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2580 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002581
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002582- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2583 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2584 the generated binary.
2585
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002586Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002587-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002588
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002589- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2590
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002591- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2592 except in the hands of experts.
2593
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002594- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002595 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2596 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2597 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002598
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002599- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2600 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2601 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2602 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2603 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2604 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2605 builds.
2606
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002607- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2608 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2609 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2610 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2611 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2612 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2613 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2614 new type.
2615
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002616- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002617
2618 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2619 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2620 positive infinities.
2621
2622 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2623 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2624 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2625 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2626 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2627 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2628 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2629
2630 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2631
2632 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2633
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002634- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2635 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2636 size of the executable.
2637
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002638- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2639 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2640 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2641 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002642
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002643- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2644
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002645- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2646 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2647 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002648
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002649- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2650 well as Unix.
2651
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002652- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2653 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2654 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2655 modules in the README file for details.
2656
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002657C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002658-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002659
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002660- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2661 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002662 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002663 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002664 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002665
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002666- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2667 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2668 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2669 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2670 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2671 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002672 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002673 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2674 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2675 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2676 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2677 aligned.)
2678
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002679- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2680 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2681 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2682
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002683- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2684 level.
2685
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002686- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2687 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2688 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2689 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2690 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2691
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002692- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2693 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2694 code.
2695
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002696- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2697 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2698 adjusting for negative indices.
2699
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002700- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2701 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2702 object.
2703
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002704- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2705 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2706 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2707
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002708- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2709 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002710
2711- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2712
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002713- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2714 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2715 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2716 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2717
2718- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2719
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002720- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002721
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002722- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002723 without going through the buffer API.
2724
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002725- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002726
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002727- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2728 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2729 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2730 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2731
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002732- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2733 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2734
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002735- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002736 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2737
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002738New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002739-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002740
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002741- OpenVMS is now supported.
2742
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002743- AtheOS is now supported.
2744
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002745- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2746
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002747- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2748
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002749Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002750-----
2751
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002752- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2753 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2754 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002755
2756Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002757-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002758
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002759- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2760 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2761 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2762 bugs.
2763 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002764 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002765 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2766 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002767 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002768
2769- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002770 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002771
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002772- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2773 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2774
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002775- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2776 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002777 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002778 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2779
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002780- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2781 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2782 use files" uninstall option).
2783
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002784- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2785
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002786- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2787 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2788
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002789- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2790 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2791 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2792
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002793- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2794 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2795 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2796 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2797 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002798 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2799 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2800 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002801
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002802- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002803 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002804 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2805 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2806 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2807 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2808 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2809 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2810 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2811 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2812 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2813 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2814 work around.
2815
2816- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2817 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2818 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2819 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2820 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2821 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2822 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2823 specified with O_CREAT too).
2824
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002825Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002826----
2827
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002828- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002829
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002830- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2831 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2832 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2833
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002834- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2835 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2836 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2837
2838- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2839 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2840 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2841 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2842 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2843 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2844 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2845 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002846
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002847- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2848 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2849 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002850
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002851- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2852 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2853 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2854 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2855 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002856
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002857- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2858 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2859 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002860
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002861- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2862 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002863
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002864- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2865 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2866 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2867 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2868 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002869
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002870- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2871 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2872 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2873
2874- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2875 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2876 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002877
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002878- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2879 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2880 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2881 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002882 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002883
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002884- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2885 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002886
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002887- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2888 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002889
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002890- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002891 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002892 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2893 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002894
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002895
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002896What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002897===============================
2898
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002899*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2900
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002901Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002902--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002903
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002904- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2905 with a custom metaclass.
2906
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002907Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002908-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002909
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002910- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2911 are proxies.
2912
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002913Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002914-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002915
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002916- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2917 very short strings.
2918
2919- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2920 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2921 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2922 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2923 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2924
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002925Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002926-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002927
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002928- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2929 close or delete time).
2930
2931- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2932 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2933
2934- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2935
2936- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002937 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002938
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002939Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002940-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002941
2942Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002943-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002944
2945C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002946-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002947
2948New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002949-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002950
2951Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002952-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002953
2954Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002955-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002956
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002957- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2958
2959- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2960 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2961
2962- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2963 deleted at process exit time.
2964
2965- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2966 in backslash.
2967
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002968Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002969----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002970
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002971- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2972 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2973 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2974
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002975
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002976What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002977===========================
2978
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002979*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2980
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002981Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002982--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002983
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002984- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2985 been extensively updated. See
2986
2987 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2988
2989 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2990
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002991- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2992 deleted!
2993
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002994- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2995 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2996 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2997 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2998 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2999
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003000- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3001
3002 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3003 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3004
3005 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3006 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3007 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3008 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3009 supported anyway.
3010
3011 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3012 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3013
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003014- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3015 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3016 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3017 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3018 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003019
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003020- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3021 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3022 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3023
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003024Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003025-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003026
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003027- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3028 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3029 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3030 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3031 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3032 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003033 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3034 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3035 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3036 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003037
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003038- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3039 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3040 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3041
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003042Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003043-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003044
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003045- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3046
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003047Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003048-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003049
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003050- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3051 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3052 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3053 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3054 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3055 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3056
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003057- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3058
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003059- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3060
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003061- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3062
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003063- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3064 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3065 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3066
3067- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3068
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003069Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003070-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003071
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003072- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3073 off a search on Google.
3074
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003075Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003076-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003077
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003078- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3079 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3080 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3081 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3082 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3083 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3084 other platforms should do likewise.
3085
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003086- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3087 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3088 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3089
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003090C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003091-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003092
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003093- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3094 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3095 producing key-value pairs.
3096
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003097- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003098 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003099 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3100 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3101 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3102 previously went unchallenged.
3103
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003104New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003105-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003106
3107Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003108-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003109
3110Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003111-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003112
3113Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003114----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003115
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003116- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3117 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003118
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003119- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3120 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3121 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3122 home.
3123
3124
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003125What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003126===========================
3127
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003128*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3129
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003130Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003131--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003132
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003133- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3134 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003135
3136 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003137 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003138
3139 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3140 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003141 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003142 This needs to be documented.
3143
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003144- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3145 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3146
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003147- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3148 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3149 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3150
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003151- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3152 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3153
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003154- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3155 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3156 class forbids it).
3157
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003158- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3159 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3160 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3161
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003162- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3163
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003164Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003165-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003166
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003167- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3168 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003169 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003170
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003171- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3172 (like 1 + '').
3173
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003174Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003175-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003176
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003177- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3178 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3179 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3180 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003181 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003182 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3183
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003184- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3185 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3186 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3187 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3188
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003189- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3190 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003191 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3192 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3193 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003194
3195- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3196 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003197
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003198- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3199 bytes on its input.
3200
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003201Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003202-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003203
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003204- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003205 convenience function.
3206
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003207- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3208 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3209 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003210 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3211 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3212 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3213 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3214 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3215 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003216
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003217- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3218 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3219 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3220 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3221
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003222- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3223 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3224 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3225
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003226- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3227 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3228 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3229 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3230
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003231- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3232 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003233 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003234 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3235 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3236 new -l and -e options.
3237
3238- statcache is now deprecated.
3239
3240- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3241 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003242 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003243 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3244 time properly taken into account.
3245
3246- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3247 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3248 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3249 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3250
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003251Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003252-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003253
3254Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003255-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003256
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003257- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3258 is built with libdb3 if available.
3259
3260- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3261
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003262C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003263-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003264
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003265- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3266 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3267 PySequence_Size().
3268
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003269- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3270
3271- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3272 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3273 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3274
3275- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3276 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3277
3278- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3279 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3280
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003281New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003282-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003283
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003284- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3285 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3286
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003287- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3288 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3289
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003290- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3291
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003292Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003293-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003294
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003295- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3296 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3297
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003298Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003299-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003300
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003301Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003302----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003303
3304- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3305 removed completely in the next release.
3306
3307- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3308 OSX.
3309
3310- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3311 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3312
3313- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3314
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003315
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003316What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003317===========================
3318
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003319*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3320
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003321Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003322--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003323
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003324- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003325 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003326 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003327 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3328 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003329 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3330 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003331 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3332 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003333
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003334- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3335 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3336
3337- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3338 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3339
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003340Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003341-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003342
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003343- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3344 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3345 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3346 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3347 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3348 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3349 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3350 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3351
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003352- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3353 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3354 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3355 example).
3356
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003357- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003358 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003359 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003360 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003361
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003362- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3363 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3364 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003365 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003366
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003367- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3368 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3369 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3370 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3371 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3372 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3373
3374 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3375
3376 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3377
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003378Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003379-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003380
3381- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3382
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003383- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3384
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003385- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3386 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003387
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003388- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3389 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3390 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3391 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3392 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3393 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003394 attributes.
3395
3396- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3397 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3398 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003399
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003400- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3401 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3402 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003403
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003404- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3405 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3406 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003407 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3408 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3409
3410- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3411 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003412
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003413Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003414-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003415
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003416- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3417 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3418
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003419- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3420 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3421 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3422 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3423
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003424- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3425 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3426 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3427 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3428
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003429 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3430 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3431 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3432 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3433 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3434 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3435 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3436 without losing information).
3437
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003438- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003439 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3440 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3441 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3442 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3443 module).
3444
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003445 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003446 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3447 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3448 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3449 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003450
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003451- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003452 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3453 encoding.
3454
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003455- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3456 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3457
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003458- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003459 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3460
3461- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3462 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3463 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3464 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3465
3466- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3467
3468- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3469 ON, and OFF.
3470
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003471- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3472 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3473
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003474Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003475-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003476
3477- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3478 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3479 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003480
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003481- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3482 been added: -X and -E.
3483
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003484Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003485-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003486
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003487- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3488 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3489
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003490C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003491-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003492
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003493- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3494 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3495 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3496 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3497 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3498
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003499- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3500 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3501 as long) arguments.
3502
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003503- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3504 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3505 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3506 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3507 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3508 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3509
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003510- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3511 input.
3512
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003513New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003514-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003515
3516Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003517-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003518
3519Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003520-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003521
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003522- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3523 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3524 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3525
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003526- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3527 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3528 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003529 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003530
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003531 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3532 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3533 import signal
3534 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003535
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003536 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003537 while 1:
3538 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003539 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003540 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3541 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3542 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3543 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003544
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003545
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003546What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3547===========================
3548
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003549*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3550
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003551Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003552--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003553
3554- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3555 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3556 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3557
3558- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3559 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3560 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3561 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3562 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3563 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3564 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003565
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003566- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003567 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003568 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3569 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3570 associate a docstring with a property.
3571
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003572- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3573 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3574 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3575 other built-in object types.
3576
3577- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3578 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3579 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3580 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3581 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3582
3583- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3584 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3585
3586- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3587 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003588 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003589 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3590 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3591 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3592 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3593 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3594
3595- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3596 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3597 class.
3598
3599- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3600 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3601 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3602 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3603
3604- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3605 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3606 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3607 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3608
3609- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3610 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3611
3612- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3613 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3614 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3615 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3616 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003617 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003618 with the same value as s.
3619
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003620- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3621
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003622Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003623----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003624
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003625- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3626
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003627- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3628 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3629 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3630 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3631 objects.
3632
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003633- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3634 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003635 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3636 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3637
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003638- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3639 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3640 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3641
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003642Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003643-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003644
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003645- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3646 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3647 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3648 by the instances.
3649
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003650- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3651 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3652 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3653
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003654- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3655 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3656 before the entire comparison is complete.
3657
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003658- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3659 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3660 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3661
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003662- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3663 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3664 getwriter().
3665
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003666- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3667 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3668
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003669- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003670 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3671 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3672
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003673- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3674 iterable object.
3675
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003676- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3677 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003678
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003679- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3680 authentication.
3681
3682- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3683 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003684
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003685- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003686 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3687 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3688 a sample driver.)
3689
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003690Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003691-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003692
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003693- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3694 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3695 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3696 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3697 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3698 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3699 kernel has large file support.
3700
3701- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3702 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3703 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3704 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3705 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3706
3707- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3708 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3709 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3710
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003711C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003712-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003713
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003714- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3715 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3716
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003717New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003718-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003719
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003720- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3721 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3722
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003723Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003724-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003725
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003726- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3727 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3728 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3729 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3730 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3731
3732- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3733 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3734 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3735 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3736
3737- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3738 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3739
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003740Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003741-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003742
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003743- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003744 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3745 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003746
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003747
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003748What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3749===========================
3750
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003751*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3752
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003753Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003754----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003755
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003756- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3757 big to represent as a C double.
3758
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003759- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3760 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3761 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3762 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3763 restriction).
3764
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003765- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3766 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3767 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3768 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3769 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3770
3771 >>> dir([])
3772 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3773 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3774 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3775 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3776 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3777 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3778 'reverse', 'sort']
3779
3780 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3781
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003782- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003783 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3784 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3785 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3786 OverflowError exception.
3787
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003788- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003789 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003790 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3791 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3792 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3793 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3794 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003795 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003796 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3797 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3798
3799 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3800 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3801 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3802 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003803
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003804- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003805 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3806 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3807 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3808 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3809 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3810 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3811 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3812 once it is created.
3813
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003814- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3815 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3816 (key, value) pairs.
3817
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003818- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003819 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3820 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3821
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003822- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3823 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3824 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3825 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3826 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003827
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003828- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003829 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3830 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3831
3832 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3833
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003834- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003835 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3836
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003837Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003838-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003839
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003840- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003841 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3842 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003843
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003844- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3845 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3846 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3847 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3848 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3849 in this area anymore).
3850
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003851- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3852 threading.Timer.
3853
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003854- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3855 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3856
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003857- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003858 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3859
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003860- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003861 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3862 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3863 converted to Python longs.
3864
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003865- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003866 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3867
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003868- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3869 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3870 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3871
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003872Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003873-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003874
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003875- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3876 division operators as per PEP 238.
3877
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003878Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003879-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003880
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003881- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3882 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3883 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3884 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3885
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003886C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003887-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003888
3889- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003890
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003891- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3892 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003893 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003894
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003895 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3896 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003897 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003898 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003899
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003900- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003901 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3902 module:
3903
3904 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003905
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003906 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3907 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003908
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003909 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3910 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003911
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003912 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3913
3914 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3915
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003916- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003917 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3918 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3919 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003920
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003921New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003922-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003923
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003924- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3925 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3926 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3927 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3928 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003929
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003930Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003931-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003932
3933Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003934-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003935
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003936- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3937 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3938 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3939 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003940 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3941 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3942 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3943 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3944 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003945
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003946- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003947 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3948
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003949
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003950What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3951===========================
3952
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003953*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3954
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003955Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003956-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003957
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003958- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3959 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3960
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003961- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3962 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3963 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003964
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003965- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3966 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3967 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3968 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003969
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003970- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3971
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003972- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003973
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003974Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003975-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003976
3977- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003978 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003979 the module docstring for details.
3980
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003981Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003982-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003983
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003984- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003985 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3986 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3987 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003988
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003989- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3990 Nick Mathewson.
3991
3992Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003993----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003994
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003995- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3996 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3997 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3998 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3999 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4000 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4001 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4002 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4003
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004004- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4005 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4006 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4007 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4008
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004009- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4010 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4011 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4012 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4013 come a long way).
4014
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004015- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4016 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4017 write filters for these warnings).
4018
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004019- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4020 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4021 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4022 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4023 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4024
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004025- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4026 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4027 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4028 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4029 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4030 older distribution.
4031
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004032Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004033-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004034
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004035- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4036 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004037 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004038
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004039- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4040 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4041 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4042
4043- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4044
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004045- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4046
4047- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4048
4049- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4050
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004051- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004052
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004053- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4054
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004055New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004056-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004057
4058C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004059-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004060
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004061- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4062 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4063 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4064 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4065 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4066 against buffer overruns.
4067
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004068- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004069 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4070 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004071 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4072 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4073 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4074
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004075- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4076 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4077 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4078 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4079 deprecated.
4080
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004081Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004082-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004083
4084- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4085 relevant is found.
4086
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004087
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004088What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004089===========================
4090
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004091*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4092
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004093Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004094----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004095
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004096- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4097 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4098 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4099 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4100 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4101 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4102 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4103 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004104 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004105 repaired.
4106
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004107- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004108 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004109 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4110 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4111 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4112 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4113 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4114 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4115 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4116 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4117
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004118- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4119 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4120 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4121 leading BMO character).
4122
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004123- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4124 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4125 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4126
4127 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4128 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4129 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004130
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004131 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4132 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4133 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4134 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4135 for various simple to use conversions.
4136
4137 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4138 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4139
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004140 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4141 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4142 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4143 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4144 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4145 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4146 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4147 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4148 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4149 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4150 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4151 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4152 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4153 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4154 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004155
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004156- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4157 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4158 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004159 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004160 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004161
4162 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004163 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4164 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4165 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4166 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4167 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004168 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4169 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004170
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004171 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4172 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4173 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004174 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004175
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004176- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4177 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4178 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4179 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4180 floating arithmetic,
4181
4182 x = 9007199254740992.0
4183 print long(x)
4184
4185 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4186 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4187 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4188 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4189 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4190 functions are of good quality).
4191
4192 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4193 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4194 algorithms to break.
4195
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004196- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4197 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4198 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4199 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4200 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4201 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4202 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4203 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4204 order.
4205
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004206- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4207 operation along the most common code paths.
4208
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004209- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4210 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4211
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004212- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4213 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4214 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4215 {}.update(UserDict())
4216
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004217- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4218 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4219 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4220 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4221 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4222 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4223 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4224 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4225
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004226- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004227 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004228
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004229 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004230 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4231 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004232 join() method of strings
4233 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004234 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4235 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004236 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004237 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004238
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004239- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4240 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4241
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004242- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4243 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4244
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004245- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4246 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4247 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4248 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4249
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004250- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4251 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004252 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004253 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4254 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004255
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004256- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4257
4258
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004259Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004260-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004261
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004262- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004263 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004264 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4265 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4266
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004267- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4268 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4269
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004270- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4271 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4272 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4273 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4274
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004275- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4276 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4277 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4278
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004279- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4280
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004281- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4282
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004283- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4284 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4285 that are still imported into string.py).
4286
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004287- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4288
4289- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4290 Now it does.
4291
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004292- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4293
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004294- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4295 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4296 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4297 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4298 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004299 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4300 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004301
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004302- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4303 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4304 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4305 'help(object)'.
4306
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004307Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004308-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004309
4310- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004311 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004312 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4313 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4314
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004315- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004316 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4317 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004318
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004319C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004320-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004321
4322- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4323 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004324
4325----
4326
4327**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**